Name of Interviewee: Hattie Brice, Thelmer Cook, & Mattie Squirewell
Name of Interviewer: Lee Hunt
Date: October 26, 2017
Accession# EDLP 004
Length of Recording (min/sec): 68:29
Sound Recording
Summary
Hattie Brice, Thelmer Cook and Mattie Squirewell all attended Fairfield High School in Winnsboro, South Carolina. Hattie Brice’s parents farmed, and she attended the University of South Carolina to pursue a career in nursing. Thelmer Cook served as principal of Geiger Elemtary School in Ridgeway, South Carolina and later became the first black magistrate in Fairfield since Reconstruction. Mattie Squirewell was a school dietician, her father a Baptist minister and sharecropper.
This interview with Hattie Brice, Thelmer Cook, and Mattie Squirewell on October 26, 2017 includes discussion of growing up in Fairfield County, South Carolina, family recollections, attending segregated schools, societal segregation of public transportation, walking to school, a typical day at school, race relations in Fairfield County, Mattie Squirewell’s house fire, race relations in South Carolina versus in the North, segregated movie theaters, societal changes since integration, and the importance of religion in the lives of the interviewees.
Transcript
Lee Hunt: Okay. Well hello, my name is Lee Hunt. I’m a PhD student at the University of South Carolina, and we are conducting this interview as a part of our class project for our school. And so we’re thrilled to have you, thank you so much for honoring us with your stories and memories today. So we’ve already signed the permission forms here, and we’ll go ahead since we’ve gotten this far, we’ll probably take those photos afterwards so that we can make sure we get a good interview in. So the microphone is here so that we can hear from all three of you equally, and so if you would, I’m going to start with you, ma’am, would you please tell us your full name?
Hattie Brice: My name is Hattie Robertson Brice.
LH: Thank you, Ms. Brice.
HB: Yes.
LH: And Mr. Cook, if you’d tell us your name?
Thelmer Cook: Thelmer T.M. Cook, male. (laughter)
LH: Okay, well thank you for letting me know.
TC: Well, since I have a girl’s–almost a girl’s name–that’s why I specify ‘male’.
LH: Well, and I have met a few ‘Thelmas’, but I could tell you were a man, so that’s alright. (laughter) So yes, and you ma’am?
Mattie Squirewell: My name is Mattie Louis Robertson Squirewell.
LH: Squirewell, alright. Thank you so much. So now we’re just going to go around, and tell us where you were born. We’ll start with Ms. Squirewell.
MS: I was born in Ridgeway, South Carolina.
LH: Okay, and Mr. Cook?
TC: Right here to Fairfield–Fairfield County.
HB: I was born here in Fairfield County.
LH: Okay.
HB: uh-huh.
LH: So why don’t you tell me a little bit about growing up… where you did, in Ridgeway and Fairfield County: what were your memories, what do you think of– about your childhood, about your family, and what it was like to grow up here?
HB: Well, I don’t know…just very enjoyable. Well, we had a close-knit family, my mother and my father. We were farmers, we farmed. On weekends, I don’t know just, my dad–what I remember most about my parents, we were just a close-knit family, and my daddy used to entertain us on Saturday nights with the mouth harp and we sang a lot. We always sang a lot in our house. And I guess we do still today when we get together, the few sisters–the few of us that’s left. Yes.
LH: Oh, that’s really neat… So Mr. Cook, what are your fondest memories or, what was your childhood like?
TC: My fondest memory as a child…I grew up on a thirty-six acre farm, and we were one of the few lucky blacks to own our property. It was handed down to us by my grandfather. He had a four hundred-acre plot, and he divided it up among his children, and so we just farmed that–about fifteen acres of that thirty-six acres. And we had one mule and maybe three or four cows that we ran in the swamps to feed and everything. And I kind of enjoyed my life. You did run across a few things, when it came down to integration and that kind of stuff. But we didn’t run into much of that, because we were on our own property so to speak.
And so I especially enjoyed Christmastime, because you got things at Christmastime you didn’t get any other time. And my dad was a public worker–he never did farm work like a lot of people, he always had a public job. So we were fortunate in that sense, and so we didn’t live like we wanted to live, but we made it pretty good in comparison to some other folk nearby. And I basically enjoyed my life, even though we had walk to school–I had to walk to school five miles one way, and my mom made you go to school; if it was raining, you still had to go. And I never thought I would live to appreciate that, but I did and I do. And my parents were always church folk, both of them. We–I could go on and on, but I lived a pretty good life. Pretty good life. Came to high school right here.
LH: That’s great, that’s great. Tell me about Christmas. You said Christmas–you really liked Christmas.
TC: And that’s when you got Brazil nuts, and raisins, and that kind of stuff.
HB: Fruit.
TC: Stuff you didn’t get all the time, like children get now. And God, that was a celebration time! (laughter)
MS: It was.
HB: I can remember my dad making the little toys, it was a place where he got this chalk-like mud and used to make toys–little animals for us–and bake them in the oven. And we would have that in our Christmas box, along with our other little stuff, because there were no bought toys–no store-bought toys. Once in a while we would get maybe one doll, a little doll or something like that, but… Then my mother sewed. She made all of our clothes when we were growing up, even my brothers, she made their clothes. I can remember my youngest brother–it was only two boys and ten girls–and my mother made his clothes–their clothes–as well. And once my brother, he–she made those little pants that come right below the knee, and he thought that he was grown and too big to wear them to church, and he was going to put…Momma had gotten them out for him to put on, and he told her, “I’m not gonna wear those old booty-bauchers today.” (laughter) …and that kind of stuff, but it was–the family life was good. We always had plenty to eat because I say, we lived on a farm, and we had chickens and cows and all that stuff–ducks and pigs…
TC: You may not have had what you wanted, but you had enough.
HB: We had a plenty.
LH: Tell me about your childhood.
MS: Well, I was born in Ridgeway, South Carolina–that’s in Fairfield County. But at age eight we moved to–it was a place called Blythewood, South Carolina. So that’s where I grew up. And my daddy was a Baptist minister but he was a sharecropper also, so I grew up–I say in the field, we had to work in the field and whatever. My mother was a dietician; she worked at the school, in the cafeteria and whatever. So my daddy always was an outgoing person, and always involved in stuff. And when it was time to register–when black people got so that they could register to vote–well he was one of the people that was registering people to vote. So that was a tough time for my family and the other black families there in Blythewood because–I guess I can say this–the Ku Klux Klan was real active at that time.
LH: In Blythewood.
MS: In Blythewood. So we used to could look out the window at night, and see them riding with their white hoods and stuff. And so, they wanted my dad to stop registering people to vote, but he didn’t. And so one Friday night somebody woke us up; our barn was burning down. So we assumed that that’s who burned our barn down, so… And also going to school and whatever, we wasn’t [sic] allowed to ride the school bus, so the white children rode the school bus and they would pass us walking to school, and they would throw all kinds of things out of the window–
HB: Same thing with us.
MS: –at us.
LH: Really?
TC: I concur.
MS: Um-hum. Well, we lived about two miles from the school, one way, and whatever. So, as I grew older, I babysit for a couple and whatever, and I would go after school to keep his little girl. And on Saturdays I would go to clean the house or whatever. But when I went, I had to go in the back door, I couldn’t go in the front door. I could go out the front door to sweep the porch, but I couldn’t go in the front door. So, but other than that, I had a pretty good life because my parents, I would say, were smart people. I never knew what ‘hungry’ was and whatever. So I graduated from Bethel High School, and I was salutatorian of our class, so I’ve had a pretty good childhood, life.
LH: Good for you.
TC: I never knew you grew up in Ridgeway.
MS: Really? (laughter)
LH: That was great. So where did you first go to school? I’ll start with you, Mr. Cook: where did you first go to school?
TC: I went to a little localized school that was named after my church out there in that area. It was called New Hope: New Hope School. It was a–based on the standards then, it was about as nice as you could’ve expected for black folk.
LH: Um-hum, so it was a black school.
TC: It was a black school, all black. No, you wouldn’t have dared go–you would’ve been lynched if you come through the white school, possibly. But really, talking lynching though, I never heard tell of anybody getting lynched, that I knew of, in Fairfield County, during my time…but I did hear about it had happened, previously (unintelligible 11:07) time. But yeah, I went to that little school out there. And then, when I got to the sixth grade…we came here in the seventh grade, didn’t we?…
HB: Came here in the seventh…
TC: I think we started at this school here in seventh grade, but I was the only one in my community that came to Fairfield. Fairfield was like a university to me (laughter) because, we was just used to going to the localized school, and most of the kids would go as far as that school went, and that would be the limit of their education.
MS: Really?
TC: But my momma, she was also education-minded, and my dad would cooperate with her on that kind of thing, so… I came up here and I boarded at a house on a street called Gulley Street right here in Winnsboro. And we used to pay my room and board; if we raised some vegetables, we’d bring some vegetables and give to the Emersons–I don’t mind calling their name, they were good folk–and I boarded with them, and I went right here for four years. And at that time you graduated in the eleventh grade. We were the last class to graduate in the eleventh grade.
HB: Yeah, we had first through the twelfth.
TC: And she was one year behind me, but it made it two, because she graduated in the twelfth grade. And we didn’t have any buses. Like she said, the white kids would ride by you, walking the road going home, and they would ride by cursing you and that kind of thing sometime; and calling you ‘niggas’ and that kind of stuff.
MS: Um-hum.
HB: Um-hum.
TC: …And holler your name. And if you lived on their property, some children–I know one family had to move that afternoon, because the children hollered back at them, and cursed back at them, and the owner of that property heard about it and said, “Well you got to go tonight.” They had to move, that afternoon. Yeah, but – well like I said, I was in a family that was fortunate that we had our own little thirty-six acre plot, and we didn’t have everything we wanted, but it was–comparatively speaking–we did well.
LH: So what was your first school?
HB: I went to Bethel–Bethel High School. It was elementary and high was all at the same.
LH: Okay, so it was a K[indergarten], or I guess first through twelfth—or first through eleven, is that right? First through eleven, or first through . . .
HB: Well, I had to go an extra year, because they put on the twelfth grade.
LH: Okay, so y’all were, I guess, in the same class I guess–or the same year?
HB: Same year. Class of ’49.
LH: Okay, is that right?
TC: Wait, I was class of ’47.
LH: And you were ’47; okay so both of you graduated high school in ’49?
HB: I did.
MS: I went to school–my first school was at a church as well; it was Shiloh School. And we lived down the hill from the school. At that time, we could walk right up the hill to the school, but eventually my parents moved and we lived…I guess approximately five miles away, and we would have to walk to school in the mornings. And my little sister Etta–I used to have to carry her on my back because she was so little–she couldn’t keep up, while my sisters carried my books. And we walked to school. And we had an aunt that lived beside the highway–well it was a dirt road at the time–and she would always call us in, and make us sit down and warm our feet, and give us something warm to drink on the way to school in the mornings.
LH: How long did that take, walking in the morning five miles? An hour?
MS: I don’t know. I don’t know, but we always got to school whatever time we was [sic] supposed to.
TC: Let me interject something, too, because we both went the same way coming to school sometime…
HB: Yeah.
TC: Remember when we rode in Mr. Ray Caldwell’s–the back of that pickup truck?
HB: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
TC: No heater back then, and in cold winters–winters are like summertime now, compared to them then.
(laughter)
HB: Um-hum. With the ice spewing up through the ground, and your feet getting cold…
TC: What was it, twenty-five cent a week, or something like that, wasn’t it?…
HB: I can’t remember what we–I don’t think we paid him anything, because he was my mother’s brother-in-law. (laughter)
TC: Yeah, yeah.
HB: Yes, and it was pretty hard. Someone would have to carry my books, because I had to carry my little sister on my back after we had moved away, and like I say, the whites was riding by on the bus, hollering obscenities at us and throwing things…
LH: And so they were going to the white school.
HB: Greenbrier School. Yeah.
LH: But they were driving by…
HB: Yeah.
LH: …in a bus, yelling and screaming and throwing…
HB: On the bus, while we were walking.
MS: Um-hum.
HB: Yeah, that was the bad part about it, but that’s . . . home life was good but….
TC: My first job, I had to go to the back of the chairman’s house. To get a so-called interview. But I wasn’t interviewed, I was just given a job, because they knew my dad. My dad was really an ‘Uncle Tom’, but he knew how to get things done that way. He was a smart man. A smart man…that only went through the second grade. But he was a smart–he knew how to work people to get what he wanted. He wasn’t doing that because he wanted to do it, but by him doing that he became a foreman on this little railroad track–that little track right down here. And he could hire and fire, they allowed him to do that. And…but the white bosses made ten cent [sic] an hour more than he did, and so it–like I said, he knew how to . . . call them ‘captain’ and ‘boss’ and this kind of thing. And they would do a lot of things for him, that they wouldn’t do for other blacks. But it used to make me sick, but I didn’t understand why he did it until I became thirty-five. I’m not much more than thirty-five now…
(laughter)
HB: That’s right!…
LH: That’s right. Well you gotta do what you gotta do, so… So I’m interested–and this is not a question on here and if you don’t want to answer that’s fine–I’m just curious: did you say you had–there were ten girls in your…
HB: Yes.
LH: And two boys, right?
HB: Two boys, yes.
LH: So there’re twelve children….
HB: Yes.
LH: That’s amazing….I don’t know if I could afford that now. How did your parents do this?
HB: Momma got up every morning and cooked up two or three pans of biscuits. We would go–my dad would get up and make the fire in the house and get the house warm, and then we would get up and go to the barn to milk the cows. And when we’d come back, Momma would have breakfast made. We always sat around the table, my dad said grace, and we had breakfasts. And then we would walk to school.
TC: You know, I lived a piece from them, I can say this about her family: they were considered one of the outstanding families in the community.
LH: Really?!
TC: Yeah.
LH: So how many children were in your family?
TC: Well just three of us: three boys. And my mom and dad, yeah.
LH: And how many children were in your family?
MS: It was nine of us. But it didn’t seem like it was a lot children or whatever, because…well sometime we slept three in a bed, and when you got a certain age or whatever three couldn’t sleep there, straight up and down, so somebody had to sleep at the bottom with their feet up that way. So that’s how I grew up.
HB: Well, that was the same with us.
MS: But our house didn’t seem to be crowded.
HB: No.
LH: It’s amazing, when you love people, you can be close, you know.
MS: Right.
LH: You don’t mind it so much. So okay, so tell me your memories of your schools. Obviously it took a lot to get there, and it wasn’t pleasant getting there, but once you got there what were your memories of your schools?
HB: We had to walk to school and when we get into the–I guess little Town of Blythewood, we had to go through it, about three stores I guess or whatever, your knees would be so cold until–you really didn’t know–it was just like ice. And when we would get to school, our principal would have a pan of water sitting on the heater because we had, like wood stoves, to warm our hands. But when we got to school, and the guys and things–they got to school early–they had to break, like limbs and stuff, to go in to keep the fire going and to heat us and whatever.
TC: It was likewise at my school. The boys had to go in the woods, and they’d get pine straw and sticks, or whatever kind of dead wood you could find.
HB: That’s right.
TC: And sometime, once and a while, you’d get maybe a bag of coal–once in a while. But most of the time it was just . . . and we had–do you know what a trash burner is? If you don’t, well we had a trash burner for a while, and one time, when we had what we called a real good heater, was a pot belly metal heater–now that was considered outstanding. But that was–and we were given all the hand-down [sic] desks from the so-called white school…We had desks with broken parts on them, all kinds of stuff–ink all over them…. We got the hand-down textbooks with pages torn out….
HB: …No back on them…
TC: …Writing all in them, and that kinds of stuff….
LH: So that’s the way all of your books were?
HB: Yeah.
TC: Yeah; unless your parents were able to buy a book.
HB: We always got the hand-down [sic] books from the white school.
TC: Well, I’ll say this about the instructors: the instructors seemed to be–based on what we knew then, and I still concur–that they were pretty well prepared knowledge-wise. They were pretty well prepared.
LH: So you felt you had good teachers.
TC: Basically we had–I had good teachers, and I think she can say the same thing.
HB: Yeah.
TC: Our principal here was–I don’t mind calling his name out, Mr. Ross–and he was an outstanding principal.
HB: Here at the high school, but grammar school, you know, it was different. Well, the teachers were good because I remember, we had Ms. Thompson from Columbia.
TC: And they were more like parents because they didn’t put up with no hocus-pocus, you didn’t–no misbehaving. They didn’t put up with it.
HB: No. You better behave yourself because my parents got, if we did anything that–misbehaved or anything and–
TC: You know what a brush broom is, don’t you? I got a whipping with a brush broom (laughter) a couple times…
(laughter)
HB: I didn’t because I was always so–
TC: I was too, but I–you know, not that I didn’t do something wrong once in a while…But it used to be made out of a stick broom, a brush where they–
HB: –What you swept the yard with.
TC: . . . swept out the yard. That’s what I got a spanking with a couple times.
(laughter)
TC: But you know, I never thought–like I said a while ago–I never thought I’d live to appreciate that, but I thank God. I do, I appreciate it; what my parents tried to do for me, and what the teachers tried to do for me, at that time. And if you—and I’ve smacked myself–they’ll come back just like me. (laughter)Yeah.
LH: So what were black and white relations like where you grew up? I mean, obviously we heard a little bit about going to school and how the children acted. Did you ever hear your parents talking about…like when integration started coming and, you know, desegregation started coming… did y’all hear them talk much about things? I know you told that story about the barn, which is unforgettable. Did y’all see things like that too in–she was in Blythewood, right–this happened in Blythewood.
HB: Um-hum.
LH: Did y’all see or hear anything like that in Fairfield? Or in this area, Winnsboro?
MS: You know, my parents, when they talked about stuff they, most of the time if it was unpleasant, they wouldn’t let us listen, my parents… But I can remember the soldiers coming through a lot here.
LH: Really?
MS: Yes, when we were growing up. The soldiers from Ft. Jackson, but you know, they never bothered us, but they would be all out in the area where we lived. But I wasn’t afraid of them or anything. But as far as integration: now there were some white families that were nice to us. I can remember our old house burned down in the middle of the night, and we never knew how that house caught on fire. But we were–my parents were renting an old house, because we didn’t own our own property at the time, and the house just caught afire and it was–it was a big house, two-story house–all the children were in the upstairs and my parents–Momma called us from the steps, “Children get up, the house is on fire.”
And what had happened, there was a barn out–and the mules were making a lot of noise, and my dad got up and when he got up he just, he said he saw all of this light, and there was a room behind the kitchen where my parents kept all of the supplies and my dad just–they had just killed hogs, and they had two hogs hanging up in the back and everything. And that’s where they kept all of the food and stuff. And that part of the house is what was on fire. We never knew how that house caught afire. But we got out, and we were able to save a little bit of the furniture from the living room, and one of the front bedrooms downstairs where my brothers slept. And that was pretty frightening. And we never knew how that house caught on fire. Never knew.
TC: There’s something I’d like to say about growing up as a black youngster. This didn’t happen to me but this did happen to a couple of my first cousins. Their mothers would work in the home, like she said, she did some working in people’s houses, and earn some money. But all the time these kids played together while they were there, but soon as the child–one parent took a relative in and said, “James is sixteen now. You been calling him James, but from now on, now that he’s sixteen, you got to call him ‘mister’.
LH: Really?
TC: Yes, ma’am.
LH: Even though they were friends?
TC: That was it. After whites became a certain age, you had to call them ‘mister’.
MS: Um-hum.
TC: I don’t know whether you know about that or not.
HB: No, we didn’t, because I can remember the Brooks, and we just called them by their names.
TC: Yeah, but not everybody did that.
HB: Yeah.
TC: Not everybody did that, but this did happen. And I’ll say this: I used to have to ride the Greyhound bus sometime, because we didn’t have buses down there. It cost me fifteen cent [sic] to ride from out there to school or to downtown. All you had to do was wave the bus down and have fifteen cent. And the blacks had to ride on the back of the bus. The whites rode on the front.
HB: Yeah.
TC: And one day the blacks were kind of crowded out in the back, nobody hardly was in the front, but the whites was kind of scattered, and you had empty seats all up in there. And I was standing up a little in front of the white man that was sitting down in the seat over there, and he asked me, “Nigga, whatchu doing up here?” That hurt me, I never will forget that. But there was one bus driver–and all the bus drivers were white then–and he was very nice, he had a little jump seat up there, right beside the bus driver, beside the door. He would put me way up there, in front of everybody. (laughter) You always–it’s always been, where you ran across a few whites that were nice.
HB: That’s right.
MS: Um-hum.
TC: They would treat you as nice as they they’ll treat you, because if they didn’t…But they couldn’t do that in front of the other whites sometimes, because they were called ‘nigga-lovers’. And so I had that to happen, and couple other experiences on riding the bus. But, and so far as integration is concerned–see I was in education and I helped to integrate–we integrated in 1970, wasn’t it?
HB: It was; I know this school closed down in 1975 I believe.
TC: Well anyway, we did . . .
LH: Some people said it was ’65, some people said . . .
TC: . . . we did integration in Fairfield…I think we integrated in nineteen…
HB: It was in the ‘70s.
LH: They said the integration started here in ’65.
HB: Probably, but . . . .
LH: That’s what he said, but I don’t know.
HB: It might have, but…
LH: I think…yeah, this one closed in the ‘70s.
TC: Well now one thing I will say for Fairfield that was a positive thing as far as I’m concerned: we never had any outward violence in Fairfield–
HB: Yeah.
TC: –that I know of, during the integration process. And I know I had a group of parents come to me one day–off Highway 34, up towards Ridgeway, and they–six white ladies came, and boy they were on my case–we were gonna be integrated in about a month–they wanted to know ‘what I was gonna do about this, what I was gonna do about… ‘ Well I couldn’t hardly do anything, (laughter) I was just there to hold a job. Because I had no authority to tell children what bus to get on or anything like that, until after we got situated, and they were assigned to buses. But anyway, some of those same parents grew to love me. And things went alright, but not as good as we would’ve liked for them to have gone, but like I said, no violence that I know of in Fairfield whatsoever.
LH: That’s good to know.
TC: Not many counties can say that, and tell the truth about it.
LH: Yeah, you’re so right. So tell me about that. Let’s talk a little bit about integration. What are your memories of it? Do you–where were you, you know, like in school? I guess you had graduated from school by then, right–from high school?
HB: Oh yeah.
LH: And so what were your–so you were past school. What were you doing? Were you still in Blythewood?
HB: No, I was in Winnsboro.
LH: Okay, so you moved back.
HB: I came to Winnsboro in ’50.
LH: Okay, okay, so what brought you . . . .
HB: My children, I had children then, and my children–because my three oldest children, they went here to school. And when the school integrated, then they had to go over to–they built a–what did they call it then?– it wasn’t . . .
TC: Winnsboro High.
HB: Winnsboro High, that’s right. And, or whatever–but they never really had no problem [sic], you know, with the other children–with the white children or whatever. You know, I know it was some prejudice there, but I guess–say they knew how to cover it up or whatever, so they never really had any problems.
TC: There were communities, for example–the Mill Village out there where Winnsboro Mills was—blacks…you used to couldn’t walk through there.
HB: You couldn’t go through there, no.
TC: No, no. Now the Mill Village is integrated. (laughter)
LH: So you couldn’t–there were certain places you just could not walk.
TC: You just couldn’t walk through there.
HB: Could not walk through.
LH: Why?
TC: They was the subject to…physically attacking sometime–
HB: That’s right.
TC: –especially a male, a young male…
HB: And sometime they did.
MS: And that went on . . .
HB: Around those black guys that walked through there at night.
MS: I mean, that, you know, they–somebody turned the dogs on a black man, it’s maybe been about fifteen years ago—
TC: –and killed him.
MS: –and killed him– just right down in that Mill Village…
LH: Fifteen years ago?
MS: About–yeah, it wasn’t that long ago.
LH: Oh my gosh!
MS: You remember the Mickell man, that was walking through there?
HB: That’s right, the Mickell guy, um-hum.
MS: They turned the dogs loose on him, them dogs ate that man, and they didn’t do anything about it.
HB: She never did nothing about it.
MS: Down there by the Mill Village. That’s how bad it was down there. You couldn’t walk down through there after a certain time, you know, at night especially.
LH: My goodness. So where were you during–I think you said you were a part of it integration.
TC: Yeah, I was in education, I was in . . .
LH: What was your role?
TC: I was an elementary school principal.
LH: Okay, which school?
TC: That’s what I started to say–I’m surprised she said she came from Ridgeway–I was principal down there at Geiger School at Ridgeway.
LH: Oh. Oh, from, is it Geiger or?
TC: We called it ‘Gig-er’ then, some people called it ‘GI-ger’–just like they do ‘Geiger counter’… And some called it ‘Giger’, but in the local community the–most of them called it ‘Giger’.
LH: That’s right… I spoke with a lady this morning who talked about Geiger, and she loved that school. Loved it.
TC: You know why she loved it?… Because I was down there.
(laughter)
LH: Well, I have to tell you, she just went on and on about how much she loved that school.
TC: I was there twenty-six years.
MS: It was named after my cousin, so…
TC: It was named after your cousin? Well they got a street right there that they named for me…
(laughter)
HB: Well, I guess when I finished the high school here, I went to Columbia and I worked at Ft. Jackson for a while. And I met a girl–I met two girls down there, and one of them had lived in Chicago, and she had lived there and worked in–she had a job there. Anyway she had gotten laid off and she had moved back home. And they had called her to come back to work, and so she said, “Hattie, how would you like to go to Chicago?” I said, “Well, Ann, I don’t know, I’ll have to ask Momma and Poppa.”–We had to ask our parents everything–even though I was grown and eighteen or nineteen years old–and so when I went home and I told Momma about it–my mother and my father–Momma say, “Well Hattie, if you wanna go you can go, you don’t have to ask me everything. You grown now.” (laughter)You know. Yeah, we had to ask, tell–well just let them know everything.
So Annie and I caught the train and went to Chicago. Ann had a job waiting for her up there and I didn’t. So she said, “Well Hattie, I tell you what, you go down on the corner and buy yourself a paper.” She knew the people that we–I think they were relatives of hers–and we lived with that man and his wife, and she said, “Go down on the corner and buy yourself a paper, and look in it and see if you can find a job of some sort. And if you see something that you’re interested in tell the bus driver, and he’ll direct you where to go.” That was in Chicago. So I did and I found a job at–where they made Head & Shoulders shampoo. But it was for–I had to go to work at six o’clock in the afternoon, and work until twelve midnight. And so I would ride down through the loop in Chicago, and they had–there was a business school; I said, I’m going to go to that school. So by me working from six in the afternoon, until twelve midnight, I got up one morning, and I went down to the school, and signed up, and I went to a business school up there.
LH: Did you really?
HB: Yes, I did.
LH: What was the name of that school?
HB: It was called–oh gads I can’t think of it–but anyway…I can’t think of the name of the school. But anyway when I graduated, I got a job at Mount Zion Hospital in Chicago. Well at first I got a job with a man that ran a cleaning company. He just cleaned office buildings and everything, and he hired me as his secretary when I finished the course. And after that I didn’t like it, because his office was in his house, so I quit the job and that’s when I got a job at the, at Mount Zion Hospital in Chicago, as a typist in the Department of Pathology. I didn’t know anything about any–I didn’t know anything about medical terminology, but I went and bought myself books and a dictionary, and I studied and that’s what I did until I, I quit and got married.
LH: Oh my goodness…great! So when you got married did you stay in Chicago?
HB: No, after . . . well my husband was living in Cleveland, Ohio at the time. Well, he was working at Westinghouse there and he got his–he told me when he was getting his vacation, so he came home on his vacation, and I resigned from my job in Chicago, and I came home a couple of weeks before the wedding, (laughter) and got everything ready, and came home. And we got married at my sister’s house, out in the yard. Bea–yeah that’s where we got married. We got chairs and a tent from McCutcheon’s Funeral Home, and I had to send out the invitations and all that before I left Chicago, and had a nice big wedding in the country.
But anyway, I went back to Cleveland with him, and I had a problem trying to find employment as a secretary. I thought that was the nicest job in the world. But anyway I finally got a job downtown in Cleveland, Ohio and I–where they made, they sold only furs and leather. It was an old rich Jew, and I worked for him for a while, and the pay wasn’t that good, and he offered me a raise within about six weeks, and when I didn’t get it in six weeks I resigned. Started looking for more work. And I had a sister-in-law that was a nurse there in Cleveland and she said, “Well Hattie, why don’t you take nurse’s training?” I said, “Well Frances, I don’t want to be a nurse, I like doing secretarial work.” But in the meantime my husband had gotten laid off at Westinghouse, so we moved back home for two years, and I got a job at McCrory Liston school, I was the first secretary at McCrory Liston school, for Mr. Graham. And I worked there for two years.
And when they called him back to work in Westinghouse, I went back–we went back to Cleveland, and that’s when I went to school, and I took a course in–I went to school and I took an LPN course: Jane Adams School in Cleveland. And I got a job working there in a hospital, it was called (unintelligible 39:35) Hospital, yes, as an LPN. And I just didn’t like Cleveland. I kept telling my husband, “You gotta get me outta here.” So we moved back home; that’s when we came back home.
LH: And so when was that, was that . . .
HB: That was in the ‘60s.
LH: The ‘60s, okay. So were you here during integration or…?
HB: Well some, yes.
LH: Some, some yes? In Cleveland a little bit, too?
HB: Yes.
LH: Did you think race relations were different up there or about the same?
HB: They were somewhat; they weren’t as bad as they are here in South Carolina.
TC: In fact, let me add on to that when you get through with that about racial relations… Go ahead.
HB: But anyway, I worked in Cleveland as an LPN, and then when we moved back here, I told my husband, I said, ‘I don’t think I wanna–I don’t really like nursing’, and so I got a job at the sewing room down here. Yes. And I couldn’t stand that job. (laughter) I quit. I went home crying, I told my husband, ‘I can’t do that’. (laughter) And so I went over to Fairfield Hospital to try to get a job as an LPN, and that day–I think they said the person that did the hiring only worked three days a week or something–but she wasn’t there. So I went on to Chester the same day, and they hired me right off the bat up there. And I worked at Chester. But I was so far advanced over the other nurses there–they only had about two registered nurses, two or three.
They had a registered nurse in the surgical department, and one on the surgical floor, but they had LPNs–they were really running Chester Hospital. And I worked there a day or two and they put me on the medicine cart, to pass the medicines.
LH: Really?…
HB: Never forget: I got a man in there, oh my goodness!… Well after–a few of the nurses decided to go back to school to become registered nurses.
LH: Mmm-hmmm…
HB: And so, when the nurse that was in charge–they made me charge of the floor. And so I never will forget: we had got this man that came in there, and he was just passing out, and we would revive him, and I’d call the doctor and he said, “Well I ordered blood, did you not get it yet?” And I said, “No, when I called the lab they said it wasn’t ready.” And so I don’t know what he did, but they called me about an hour later and told me to come get the blood. And they had some kind of old machine that I had never seen, and I hooked that blood up and pumped it into that man–and his hemoglobin was only like three grams, you know, he was gonna die. But I got him, we got him….
LH: So were you managing white nurses as well in that role or was it, was it just black nurses?
HB: We didn’t have–very few white nurses at the time. We didn’t have hardly any registered nurses, there were a few white LPNs, yes, and they made me charge over the floor, over the medical floor. And so old Dr. Gaston–I never will forget him–he said, “Girl, why don’t you go back to school. You do everything that registered nurse–” and I was, because I was so far advanced over the other nurses, because I took my training in Ohio. And so I did, one of the girls–she was a white girl–she said–she and I became very good friends–she was very nice and I never will forget her. She’s still alive right there in Chester. She say, “I’ll go with . . .” I said, “I don’t know anything about going to school.” And so she say, “I’ll go with you.” She drove down from Chester to my house, and we went to Columbia together, and she helped me get signed up at university, and I took my RN’s degree down there.
LH: That’s great.
HB: Yeah.
LH: Yeah.
HB: Yeah. I did, I got my RN’s degree down there, at the University of South Carolina. And I tell you, it was pretty rough because my first anatomy and physiology test, I flunked it. So I called up–
LH: Really?
HB: –Yes, I did, because I didn’t know anything about sciences. Because they taught a little bit here, but it weren’t [sic] that much. And so I called the principal at Zion High, I told him, I said, “You know, I graduated from a small school–integrated school–in Winnsboro, and I just didn’t get anything out of your lectures.” And I said, “Do you mind if I would buy a recorder and tape your lectures?” He said, “No.” And he say, “I’ll tell you what, you come up any . . . if I teach you anything you don’t understand, come up to my office after class.” I did that for about a month, after class I would go up to his office, and he would go over everything he went over with me. And so I would take notes during the lectures and record his lecture, and I drove from Blair to Columbia every day, plus I worked on the weekends still at Chester. And I would, at night I would get dinner and everything, and I would tell my husband, “Don’t bother me for anything.” I say I put the coffee people into business because I would put on a pot of coffee and that’s what I did: I would go over my notes every night, and fill in my notes according to my recorder, and read it over at least three times before I went to bed, and many nights I didn’t go to bed at all. Yeah. And I would–I bought myself an alarm clock, and we would have a study class, you know, during the day, and I would go get in my car and set my clock to alarm, and I would take a nap in the car. That’s what I did when I was going to nursing school.
LH: So I assume that you finished.
HB: I did. I did. I graduated, of course–never flunked another subject after that. I loved the microbiology, I really did. Yes.
LH: And so, did you end up doing your career here?
HB: I still work at Chester Hospital.
LH: Oh, you still do? Oh, that’s right you said you’d worked a shift last night, isn’t that right?
HB: I did, I worked twelve hours last night. And I gotta go in tonight again. Because when I retired–I retired as a supervisor, I made it to supervisor.
LH: Wait, you retired? But you’re still working.
HB: Yeah, they asked me to stay on and help out, what they call ‘prn’, so that’s what I do.
LH: Okay. Goodness.
TC: I been retired for twenty-four years.
HB: Really…(laughter)
TC: And I’m not but thirty-five….
(laughter)
LH: (laughter) Wow!
TC: But what I started to say though, back–I think we must want to dwell on this integration process or something about race relations–back during the time when I was graduating from high school, just about everybody was in the–she knows this and I know she knows, too–all the people from here, they would–all the ones that could, just about, was going north; everybody want to go north…
MS: Connecticut.
TC: Call that going to the ‘ebony land’; go up there and –I graduated in ’47– I’m gonna go up here, I’m gonna get me a job in Bethlehem Steel Yard….
LH: In Pennsylvania.
TC: And I get up there—yeah–and I absolutely hated the city.
HB: I did, too.
TC: And I didn’t get a job at Bethlehem Steel, I got a job at a place where they made tombstones.
LH: (laughter)
TC: I was making fifty cent [sic] an hour here, and I got up there I was making sixty cent [sic] an hour. Anyway, my whole point in bringing it up, is the race relations in the north, after you stayed there a little while, you found out. They really weren’t as good as the race relations here. some of the people–
HB: There’s a lot of prejudice there.
TC: –up there that pretend that they so for you, will bite y’all in the back; and here at least you were told to your face. (laughter) And race relations turn out–right today–I guarantee race relations are a lot better in South Carolina than they are in places like Baltimore, Hartford, Connecticut, and places like that. Now I’m not saying they are bad there, I’m just saying when it come right down to basic truth, people are better here to each other than they are up there.
MS: Yeah.
LH: Well, I’ll tell you they weren’t praying before their oral histories, I can tell you that right now. I was amazed at that, I was like, oh how wonderful! So, well that’s, no that’s great. Alright, what y’all have covered is even better than these questions. So then, okay, so actually what you said actually brings us to some of these questions that I haven’t gotten to ask really, today. Do you think things are…have they changed significantly, here in Fairfield County, since you grew up? Are things better? Are they worse? Do you think we’ve made any progress at all with race relations or?
TC: Depending on what you call better.
(laughter)
LH: No, that’s good, tell me. Tell me about that, how do you feel?
TC: Insofar as it used to be, a black male better not look at white female.
MS: That’s right.
TC: But that’s no longer true here. Or I don’t say it’s not true in some respect, but right on the– Mill Village right now, we have a lot of integrated families out there, and a lot of black males are living in the home with the white families. So if you want to call that ‘better’, then that’s a whole lot better. And it used to be you didn’t–they didn’t care how much you knew, they wasn’t gonna [sic] make you supervisor. And if you didn’t watch out you would have to teach somebody how to become supervisor, and they wouldn’t let you become supervisor.
But now–and I knew somebody that had that happen to them, right in the military. But yeah, things have gotten a lot better in that sense, and now you can hold positions you wouldn’t’ve thought about holding then, so things have, they have improved. And then when you compare here to other places, everywhere just about some things got better, some things got worse. But it’s–I think everybody would just about agree, if they lived back in the time when we came along–things are better; race relations are much better. I remember when they first started, it used to be, they wouldn’t call a black man or a black woman ‘Mr.’ or ‘Mrs.’ for nothing. Now I get ‘mistered’ to death.
(laughter)
HB: Yeah, I’m Mrs. Brice.
LH: And you should be, you’ve earned that.
TC: Absolutely. People have basically changed, you hardly ever run across, at least I hardly ever run across a rude white individual. I’ll tell you the truth, I’ve just been real pleased with the progress I’ve seen.
MS: Oh yeah, they’re quite respectful here in Winnsboro. But I changed jobs in ’69. I was working right down here at Gordon Elementary, and I was working as a teacher’s aid in the classroom, but my children were getting older and I wanted them to go on to school. So the salary I was making there, I know I couldn’t put them through school. So I was talking to my next door neighbor, and he worked at a plant right down there on the Mill Village–you know Roy?
TC: Yeah.
HB: Um-hum.
MS: And he said, “Well, why don’t you, I know you don’t like hard work I don’t suppose.” I said, “Well I came back to the cotton field, I know what hard work is.” And whatever, he said, “Well, I can get you on down there ‘cause they have started hiring blacks.” And so, sure enough they called me from down there to come down for an interview. So I went, and I got the job. And I was the first black female that had been hired in that department. And so once I got in there and started work, a white lady came to me and she said, “You know what, Mattie?” I said, “What?” She say, “We never had to work this hard until they put you blacks in here.” And she told me that. She did.
LH: ..heaven forbid…
MS: Yeah, she came to me because she was—oh, she was raining down with sweat, and whatever–and see they had upgraded the jobs to the–machines went faster and everything, but they were doing that to make us work hard, but then those white ladies in there had to work hard, too, and they was upset about it. And that’s what she came in and told me, she say, “We never had to work this hard till they put you blacks in here.”
(laughter)
LH: Did you say thank you? (laughter)
MS: Just smiled.
LH: That’s right, just smile.
MS: I just smiled, I didn’t even answer; I just smiled.
TC: Well you know I was the first black magistrate in the –since Reconstruction–right here in Fairfield?
LH: Really?!
TC: Yeah, yeah. That was in 1970, when I was elected. And then you had to–they didn’t have where you could only campaign in certain little sections, then, you had to campaign the whole county, and that’s where I got asked, “Thelmer, you expect to win?” I say, “Well Mr. Robinson, I don’t expect to lose.”
(laughter)
LH: Did he laugh?
HB: Mr. Roy?
TC: Mr. Roy. And he–Mr. (unintelligible 54:00) Lewis with him then. I told him, I said, “I don’t expect to lose.” But I won, and when I won they brought the books over to the house and dumped all the law books on my front room table. They say, “Alright you it.” That’s all the deputy told me and he was kind of insulting but yeah, he didn’t have anything really, no voice in what was going on. But I managed to work things out without any training, just from what I had seen on television. Things worked out fine, I think I earned a pretty good reputation–
HB: Yeah.
TC: –with it, and it worked out. But yeah, things were something back then, they didn’t want you to be anything.
HB: Hum-um.
TC: But I said I was just tired of hearing that blacks couldn’t get into hardly anything that had any authority.
HB: I didn’t have too much problem, no more than what–after I finished my nurses training at USC in Columbia, the super–the director of nurses, she had a friend that she wanted to be in charge of the floor that I was over, and she called me down to her office one day and she said, “You know what? I think I’m gonna move you to newborn nursery” I said, “Ms. Whetsell, (sp.) I don’t like OB nursing.” I mean, it’s not like that I don’t care about OB nursing and what they were doing….
LH: Right, right, and that’s a different kind of nursing. Very different.
HB: Yes, it is. Yes, it is. And she say, “Well, I tell you what; I’m gonna move you.” I said, “Well, you’re the director. I’ll go if you move me.” So I went up into the newborn nursery–I just loved those little babies–but I liked open space. I can’t stand to be closed in and, you know, you had to be so careful around the mothers, and the newborns, and all of that. I stayed in there for three years and one of the other nurses, she was working–she was doing chart review–we went to different hospitals. She was a white nurse–and like I say, integration, it wasn’t too bad for me–and she came to me, she said, “You know,” –we had lunch together one day and she said, I was telling her I really didn’t like OB nursing, I liked the little newborns, but I couldn’t stand them new mothers. She say, “Well, why don’t you come with me and get a job?” So I did; I went and signed up at this little place there in Columbia right across from Richland Memorial Hospital.
But they put me over three hospitals, that was Fairfield, Chester and Newberry Hospitals. I made rounds to those hospitals and I did chart review. I quit the nursery, yes, I did that. And then all of a sudden they cut out the program, I think Medicare came in in some way, but they cut the program out. And so I had an office at Fairfield, I had an office in Chester, and so Ms. Whetsell(sp.)–the very one that sent me to the nursery, she–when I turned in my resignation , because, you know, they were closing that job down that they had; she got her little refreshments and came down to my office and she said, “What are you gonna do when you leave?” Said, “You’re gonna be leaving in two weeks.” I said, “Yes.” I said, “The first thing I’m gonna do is take a vacation.” And so she said, “Why don’t you come on back to work here, you can have your same old job back.” I said, “Oh, I don’t know, I’ll have to think about it, Ms. Whetsell. (sp.)” But anyway, that lady called me every week; she called me to see… So I talked it over with my husband–I didn’t want to work at Fairfield because it was a good bit of prejudice at that hospital at the time–by me working and doing chart review I could see it–
LH: And you’d heard about the hospital here.
HB: –Yes. Yes, I had. So I didn’t want to work here. Well, Newberry was a nice little hospital, I really liked it, but I didn’t know anybody over there. So I talked it over with my husband, he say, “Well, since you know Chester, why don’t you just go back up there.” So I did, I went on back to Chester, and I told her I said, “Well, Ms. Whetsell . . .” the next time she called I said, “I think I’ll come back to Chester.” She say, “You can have any job you want.” And I said, “I’ll tell you what . . .”, they had an intensive care unit with five beds, I say, “I think I’ll work in the intensive care unit, I’m not gonna do the floor anymore.” And so that’s what I did; I went to intensive care and I worked the intensive care unit in Chester. And so anyway, she eventually got fired, herself. (laughter)
LH: Well, we just have a few minutes left and I–
TC: But I do want to say this–
LH: Okay, alright.
TC: Way back before schools integrated, the ratio of black teachers to students was awful. Sometimes they’d have forty, fifty students.
LH: Really?
TC: Yes, ma’am. You all remember that don’t you, when you had the big classes?
LH: Did you have that many, too?
MS: Um-hum.
HB: Yeah.
TC: Then after–that’s another good thing came out of integration, and the state started passing regulations and everything, that the ratio had to be a specific amount in order for you to be qualified to have your school, you know, appraised and everything. So that was a good thing that came out of integration. Now the ratio was a certain number for all the teachers. And then you had a whole bunch of white teachers for a few white students, but then after we integrated that kind of evened things out a bit. And even as the principal, they didn’t order us to ‘hire this white’, ‘hire this black’, but you had to have common sense on your own as a principal. They didn’t try to lower the number of blacks and hire a bunch of whites, but you tried to keep the ratio about the same as when you integrated on your own, and that’s what we as black principals did and it worked. It worked. And so that was a good thing that came out of it.
LH: So we are pretty much at that point. Is there anything else that you want to make sure we’ve recorded, any memory, any perspective, anything that you think’s important for us to know about your experience?
TC: Well police officers was about the same–you know more, probably, about police officers than I do…
HB: Well, my husband was on the police force. In fact he was the first black person–he made Captain.
TC: …made captain…
LH: Really?!
HB: Yeah, that they hired in Fairfield County.
LH: That’s amazing! That’s wonderful.
TC: And people in your family started it well with physicians and stuff, yeah…. A lot of good things happened; lots of things have improved, but we don’t let that fool us. There are still a lot of things that need to be changed.
LH: That’s right…
HB: Yes, yes, it is.
TC: And one of the things [is] in the White House…
(laughter)
LH: Well, I don’t think . . . we got a few more years of that. That’s set for a while anyway.
TC: I just had to get that one in.
(laughter)
LH: No! I know!…but we’ve got to laugh, don’t we?…
MS: Even though your children are–I say my children, I know yours too–are doing well and whatever, you still have to let them know: you still got to be humble and respectful to get where you want to be.
HB: Yes. And could I say one other thing? You got to know the Lord.
MS: That’s right.
HB: Um-hum.
MS: My daughter…well she works for the county commissioners, one of the largest accountants in North Carolina; and she’s clerk of commissioners and whatever, and she be all, “Oh Momma, I’m so tired of those politicians.” And whatever. I told her, I said, “Just don’t forget what you were taught, and keep God in front and it’ll work out for you.”
HB: Right. That’s right.
MS: So she’s been there long enough now; she’s not old or nothing, but she got enough years in, so she’s coming out this year, coming up, and she’s just 58 years old and whatever. So that’s one of the main things to teach: keep God in your life, and to be humble and respectful, and you’ll get respect.
LH: That’s right…
TC: That’ll get you further than a degree sometime.
(unintelligible 1:03:29 )
LH: That’s right. Treat everybody with respect. Whoever you meet.
HB: Then, you’ve got to be determined and set a goal: what you want to do in life, and what you want your life to be, you know. And ‘you can make it if you try’, as the saying goes.
TC: But I just to say this. Because I like to talk–directly about the race relations: we used to have to go to the movies, all the blacks had to go upstairs.
MS: Upstairs, go right up there.
LH: In the balcony?
TC: In the balcony.
LH: And when I was a little girl, that’s where I wanted to sit. Isn’t that funny that that’s, I mean, how . . .
TC: Sometime when we got brave enough we would throw paper from there.
LH: Good for you. Because they threw stuff on you…I think that’s good turn.
HB: My mother called and she said, “Y’all aren’t going to that movie to be sitting in that hen nest.” That’s what she called the balcony, the ‘hen nest’. (laughter)
LH: (laughter) …the ‘hen nest’….
TC: And when you rode on a train, they made you ride on the front of the train, but you had to ride on the back of the bus.
MS: That’s right.
TC: And the reason why they made you ride on the front of the train: you had the train, there were smokers in, and you’d get the smoke first.
LH: Oh my goodness. Well, at least that has changed, that’s different now. Thank goodness.
TC: Yep, that’s different Yeah, you had to get on the front of the train. Yeah. But you had to get on the back of the bus. I didn’t care; wasn’t nobody in the white section, you still had to get on the back of the bus.
HB: I was just looking at this question, number seventeen, ‘how did your schooling experience influence your life’? I feel like, being positive and just going after what you want. Yes.
LH: And that’s what your schooling taught you. That’s wonderful. That school did a good job, if that’s what they taught you…those are lessons to live your life by.
HB: Yes, yes, yes.
LH: Well, I’ll ask all of you that, what did your schooling teach you?
MS: To persevere and whatever your goals in life, always be positive and try to make those goals, and most of all being respectful.
LH: And what do you think, Mr. Cook?
TC: Well, one thing I’ve learned through experience: you can’t be so quick to give up, and that’s the perseverance you were talking about. And sometime you gotta take things you don’t want, to try to get the things that you want to get to. And that still works today.
LH: I think that’s something I think some young folks are missing now. They want what they want, right now.
TC: Yeah. But they wanna . . . even right now when young couples get married, they want the big screen television, the new car, and the new house. You can’t have it all.
HB: Well, that’s it. Like, I have a niece who was talking about what she wanted. My sister say, ‘well, she wasn’t gonna be flipping no hamburgers’, she say, “Well what do you expect when you don’t have but a ‘hamburger education’?” You know? You got to move out and get some of the, do some of the things–some of it may not be a good experience; you have to work hard at some things but, in order to get what you want, you really have to work for it.
TC: You still talk soft. (laughter) I remember from back in school, you always had that soft voice. And I don’t hear worth two cents….
LH: You talk softly, but carry a big stick, right?
(laughter)
TC: That’s it, that’s exactly right. I was in the military, and I have tinnitus in this ear.
LH: Were you a tanker?
TC: No, I was in the infantry.
LH: Okay, my husband was a tanker, he has terrible tinnitus and terrible hearing, he’s 40.
TC: Well, you know what I’m talking . . . and you could even hear voices, and hear things, and it’s loud enough for you to hear, but you still can’t decipher it.
LH: Right, that’s what he says.
TC: Yeah. So I have that problem; and I bought these things about–I’ve had them about six months: six thousand, three hundred dollars. Insurance didn’t pay a nickel. And they aren’t worth…but three or four hundred dollars. (laughter) …Well, they don’t do that much for me…
LH: Well, I think I’m going to end our wonderful time together. Thank you so much, thank you for honoring us with your memories.
HB: Thank you.
LH: Is there anything else you’d like to share?
HB: I don’t think so.
TC: I can’t think of anything else.
LH: Alright, well this has been wonderful. Thank you so much and we’ll just end this session now. Thank you.
End of Interview