| Summary: | (7:00) Mrs. Mussleman recalls Christmas, canning and funerals during the early 1900s.Florence-Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive
Interview with Helen Mussleman
March 4, 2008
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Freda Daily
Clip 4
Helen Mussleman: I want to tell you about Christmas. At Christmas we hung up one of them big, long black stockings and we’d get us maybe a apple or two, an orange or two, and no bananas and a few nuts and a stick of candy and there was our Christmas; no toy, I never got a toy. And then it, that’s the only fruit we ever got, we didn’t get anymore during Christmas, you know during the winter months at all.
Freda Daily: Did you have canned fruit from the summer?
HM: All the year we tried to can, you know, you, they canned some stuff, like pickles and stuff and jellies and stuff, but some of it would ruin, you know. Go down in that old, after I married I’d go down in that cellar and hear something going psssss, you know, and there’d be a can ruined until we got started doing green beans in the wash pot. You know, boil them in the can. And then I got my, my first canner and I’ve still got it. Boy I had something when I got that.
FD: About when did you get it?
HM: Oh, goodness, it was about in sixty, yeah I guess around, before the sixties, in the sixties. The first one that come out. And, and you could can everything in there, corn, and you leave corn in it a long time, it would turn it kind of yellow, but still you could, you know, and, and boy you could just can everything in that, squash and all this stuff that we used to couldn’t can, you know.
FD: People listening may not understand, you were canning, what were you canning in, tin or glass jars?
HM: Glass jars, umhum. And it, and it’s got, had a registered old top, you know, with numbers on it and you’d watch them numbers—
FD: Watch the pressure.
HM: Pressure. Yeah, I have still got it, the book and then I got me a new kind of pressure after that where it’d go sps, sps, sps, spew, you didn’t have to watch it.
FD: Well, and, and tell me about when you, the end of your school. How long did you go to school? How old were you when you, when you finished school?
HM: Oh, I was about, let see it was Weeden School, the Depression was on and the school ended because the schools went out—
FD: No money.
HM: No money. And I went down, my sister-in-law was working at the knitting mill, and got me a job at the knitting mill.
FD: And you were about how old?
HM: I was about six-, seventeen, about 16— [inaudible]
FD: Well, were you, were you courting by that time?
HM: Ah, not much.
FD: Tell me about how people dated back then.
HM: Ah, you didn’t, you didn’t, you just walked to church, or—and you hardly ever, you walked everywhere you went. We did, up town, from Weeden Heights all the way uptown and everywhere you went, we walked or in the wagon, used to ride in the wagon a lot, but we walked. But when I was little, growing up now, and my daddy, we had the old Huntsville Road, he run a store up on the top, up on the bank, and we lived back in a log house, the back. Well, across the road was a black couple, Charlie and Mary, and they had a white, pretty house and a swing on the front porch, you know, and I called them Uncle Charlie and Aunt Mary. And my daddy, he’d watch me of course with nothing coming down the road much but wagons, anyway, and I’d go to the store, and had paths, you know, to go down the store, and I’d go over to Aunt Mary’s house, and she cooked me cookies all the time and me and her sit in the swing and talk and feed me cookies, and they was my Uncle Charlie and Aunt Mary. And then we had some black friends that lived over in the woods after we moved to another place on Wilson Dam Road, over in the woods, there was one, only one house on Wilson Dam Road, as you, as you go around the park, there’s one house and it’s still there, and I had friends lived there and then we could go through the pines to my house and get on Wilson Dam Road and go to their house and over in this woods was these three or four houses, black people lived there. Grandpa, he had long white whiskers, and long white hair and he’d come home, you know, and stop and come in and talk, and his wife, and we’d go visit them, and one morning, I spent the night with my friend over there, I was kind of a teenager then, and we heard them a-crying next morning and it was cold and we run over there and in the back room in this high woods, you know, it was high off the ground and cracks in the floor but they was nice and clean, and their brother, her brother had died, he was laying back there in the kitchen on the floor on a quilt with overhauls on and it was cold back there and had a pillow, I reckon he must have slept back there, you know, I, I reckon he did. But, they didn’t have a fire back there, but it was cold in that room.
FD: And when someone died, what did, when you were a child, what did they do to prepare for the burial and all?
HM: Oh, well we had a funeral home in town, you know, lots of people had this cheap funeral, I still got my page, out of so many cents a week. I still got about a three or four hundred dollar funeral. That’s what it was, yeah. And they would have services in some of the homes, lots, [they’d] have the services in their homes.
FD: And do you remember sitting up with the dead?
HM: Oh, yeah, we’d sit up with the dead, umhum, yeah, we would.
FD: And why do you think?
HM: I don’t know why, but we just did. When we lived in Lawrenceburg, my daddy’s brother lived on up in Wayne County somewhere and he had had a son was up in Ohio when he died and he came, he came on a train to Lawrenceburg just in a casket. And my daddy had a little spring wagon, you know what a spring wagon is, it’s a small back, he, it was at night and he was at the depot and, uh, you know, picked up the casket and brought it to our house. And we lived out in, in a field and, uh, the businesses started down here and then up here a big field and then our house was up there. And when my daddy came in, well there was a whole bunch of cars followed him to our house. And the next day then, my uncle came down on a flatbed truck and got him and carried him up in Wayne County somewhere. And my grandpa’s buried up there; I’d give anything to know where it is. I can’t, I went to the funeral, but I don’t know, my mother’s daddy was ninety-three, in the Civil War, he told me a lot about the Civil War.
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