| Summary: | (7:57) Houston Cobb discusses his ancestors, slavery and sharecropping. This interview is part of an oral history project funded by a grant from the Alabama Historical Records Board, managed by the Alabama Department of Archives and History staff, using funds provided by the National Historical Preservation and Records Commision.Florence-Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive
Interview with Huston Cobb
May 27, 2009
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Clint Alley and Patti Hannah
Clip 3 of 9
Clint Alley: You said that you, you knew your grandparents pretty well then; your grandfather was a pastor?
Huston Cobb: Yeah.
CA: And his name, what does that say? T.C. Carter?
HC: T.C. Carter.
CA: T.C. Carter, okay.
HC: And at the time I never thought nothing about it. I never heard nothing but, well, his name was Tracy, but I don’t know what the ‘C’ is for.
CA: Uh-huh.
HC: And nobody—he has two daughters that’s still living and, ah, well let me see, one of them ninety-three and the other one eighty-seven. And don’t either one of them know, you know, what that ‘C,’ I’m interested in knowing. I’d like to know what that stood for because my brother—well he had a son named Carl, and I have a brother named Carl that was named after my uncle. So his name, that ‘C’ could’ve been—
CA: Could’ve been Carl, then.
HC: Yeah. But I don’t, ah, I don’t know because I wasn’t interested in doing this stuff, see this is the census of my folks on my daddy’s side, I’ve gone back. You know, blacks wasn’t on the census as families until 1870.
CA: 1870.
HC: And I’ve gone back to 1870. That’s my great-great grandfather. No, this one here, that’s his brother, and that’s my great-great grandmother. She was three years old. And that’s her picture, up there with the hat on beside my Navy picture.
CA: Uh-huh. Okay. So that’s your great-great grandmother.
HC: Yeah. Now I knew her well, she used to come over here and tell all those stories and things.
CA: Oh yeah?
HC: Haint stories and stuff like that.
CA: Um-hm. So you knew your great-great grandmother too, then?
HC: Oh, yeah, yeah.
CA: Okay. Now was she—she was three years old in 1870, so she wasn’t born into slavery, was she? That would have been her parents.
HC: No, she’d have been, yeah, she, she was, slavery was over in, what, ’65?
CA: Um-hm.
HC: Yeah.
CA: Okay, okay. So did your, did your grandparents or great-grandparents or anything, did they ever tell any stories about slavery?
HC: I used to hear her, this old lady here, my great-great grandmother, Candace, was a mean old lady they said. And the, the children, they, they, I guess they would be her grandchildren, that I knew, like, ah, this man right here. I’d hear them talk about her and my, how glad they were the day when they carried her to the graveyard because she was mean, didn’t even bother to pick up a peach or a apple or nothing that fell off. When she left, she went to town or somewhere, they’d cook eggs and they’d just have a ball. They had a ball the day they carried her to the graveyard!
[laughter]
CA: That’s pretty good.
HC: So those are, and then I heard her say that they, that she, when slavery was over, and they had some kind of meeting I guess to announce to them that, and she came back and told her son, this one right here, Tom, and that’s Tom’s son, there. Tom’s grand-, Tom’s daughter. But she told him, “Tom, you don’t have to take this no more. If that little white boy hits you, I want you to hit him back.”
[laughter]
HC: So that’s about as far as I—that’s supposed to be some authentic stuff, that might not’ve even happened, but that’s what they—But I, I never did hear nothing about no, see a lot of folks think that, ah, somebody’s standing over the slave with a stick, beating them. Well that would be crazy. You could do that—like I was talking about my daddy having that car? When I came back out of the service, we used to race up and down the road, do spinning tires; that road was gravel out there then. Doing all that kind of stuff. I don’t do that now. [laughter] And so that’d be the same principle of a slave owner butchering up his slave, and that’s—they didn’t have no lot of money. Slaves was the, their wealth was, you know, was built into that.
CA: Oh, yeah.
HC: And if you do away with them—and that’s the reason, that, ah, so many black folk had land, cause they was already there, working. And the master he came—you know, he’s paying somebody to do his stuff, so he’d sell cheaply, and they, they’d come in possession of it. Where, now you, you wasn’t a slave, you weren’t there. Who are you gonna sell this stuff to, the slave that’s been loyal there working with it, because he’s probably gonna have to get his money back from third and four, or something like that, share— some type of sharecropping. That was my problem when I came out of the service. They were giving you, I believe it was a hundred dollars a month if you was in some kind of business or you could be farming or, as a matter of fact Senator, Senator Heflin got that hundred dollars a month for, you know, his law practice. If you were in business, you could get it. So I go down there to sign up, man ask me, “Who’s gonna buy the fertilize?” I’m sharecropping, I’m thinking. I said, “We both gonna buy it. We’re gonna get to see who’s gonna furnish the, you know, the plow tools and the mule and things.” But I thought that sharecropping was meaning that you’d get in there and work and then, ah, share the proceeds. That was my interpretation. Shoot, I didn’t get nothing that, that year.
[laughter]
HC: Got back home, Daddy said, “Son, I thought you knew what sharecropping was!” Now, how could I know? We already had our own land. We had that over there and then had this forty-six acres here. It wasn’t ours, but we always considered it to be ours. We had it all our life, rented it cheaply, and then finally bought, bought it from Old Man Johnson. But, ah, I didn’t know nothing about no sharecropping, about the owner’s supposed to furnish this and you supposed to furnish that, and all that kind of stuff. I didn’t get nothing.
CA: My goodness. Ah, what was the name of the school you went to?
HC: This one down here was Bethel.
CA: Bethel? Okay.
HC: Yeah, the one-room school. And then I went to Leighton Training School. That was the high school. You know why they call them ‘training schools?’
CA: No, sir.
HC: Because they couldn’t—legislation wouldn’t furnish money for blacks to have a high school, so they called it a ‘training school’ and then they’d get money. That’s authentic, you can check that out!
[laughter]
|
|---|
