| Summary: | (7:05) Ms. Sharp tells about her family and how her father taught her to read and write.Florence-Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive
Interview with Artie Sharp
September 20, 2011
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Rhonda Haygood and Patti Hannah
(Also present are: Lee Freeman and Mrs. Sharp’s son, Jack Sharp)
Clip 1
Artie Sharp: Well I just want to say that my name’s Artie Sharp and I live on County Road 5 out near Central and I’m eighty-eight years and three months old and I’ve got some people here from the public library in Florence wanting to interview me. I don’t know how it’s gonna turn out. God help all of us. But, ah, anyway I can’t remember y’alls’ name.
Rhonda Haygood: I’m Rhonda Haygood and this is Patti Hannah and that’s Lee Freeman.
AS: We gonna have an interview here. I don’t know how it’ll turn out, so, anyway whatever you girls want to ask me.
RH: Well today is September 20, 2011 and we’d just first like to start out and ask you if you could tell us when and where you were born.
AS: I was born at Waterloo, Alabama, 1923.
RH: Who are your parents?
AS: My parents was Will Landrum and Pearl Vinson Landrum. And I was the fourth child of the family. My first baby sister died stillborn and I had two brothers, Ellis and Clarence, and then me. And I’m the nut that was born the fourth one. But anyway, life has been a long, rugged, rough road of briar patch that I’ve been climbing though eighty-eight years.
RH: Well, did you go to school when you were little?
AS: When I was a little we lived in Arkansas on a cotton plantation a mile from school, a mile from the town of Tyronza, Arkansas. Well, we faced the north. You’d have to walk; there was no buses. And just me and I was eight years old and one other little girl, Cora Lee Bratcher, lived up the road and we had a bunch of mean boys that we all had to walk to school and no matter how cold it was and you’d have to live in Arkansas to understand how cold that wind can get. There is no trees hardly there to knock off the wind and you’d just put on what you’d get on as much as you could and then you’d almost freeze to death a walking to school and a walking back. So Daddy got tired of the boys irritating me and my little friend, Cora Lee, and he stopped me. I got to go maybe three or four days and he stopped me from going to school and he said he was gonna start giving me homeschooling. My daddy had a third grade education and I wanted to go to school real bad. I craved to go to school ’cause I’d hear other people talk about going and getting an education. I’d get an old pencil and Daddy’d be writing letters and I’d be marking and I’d pretending to write and I’d sit down and I’d mark and write and I didn’t know split beans from corn about writing. Anyway, all the rest of the kids would go to bed at night and Daddy’d say, “Don’t you go to bed.” My brothers didn’t want to learn how. They just sleepy-headed and too, they just didn’t care. And I’d want to learn how to read and write. Daddy’d say, “You sit up after everybody’s gone to bed, why, I’m gonna give you some lessons. I want you to learn to read and write.” Daddy saw something in me. I think he picked up that need and that want that I had, craving to write, to be able to read and write. And, so anyway, he would give me lessons. He said, “We don’t have no books now and all I’ve got is the bible.” My family was Christian folks and they read the Bible. It’s the only book, paper in our house anywhere. Daddy’d get the Bible and he’d open it up and tell me to get a pencil and paper and “you write down what I tell you to write.” He’d say, teaching me how to count first. And he’d make me count to a hundred and I’d count to a hundred and he’d say, “Now I’m gonna teach you the numbers” and “one, two, and three” and on through the Bible. He’d say, “Now, then I’m gonna teach you how to add this.” And he’d say, “Two ones is two” and so forth and he took me all through like that and then he’d teach me how to multiply. You know, two and two, and four and four. And then he began to teach me, somehow or another Daddy knew the multiplication table and Daddy knew his ABCs, but he only went to school to third grade. And so he would teach me how to do that, all them numbers and when Daddy wasn’t, be around, I’d get that little old piece of pencil I used and a piece of paper, sometimes it’d be a paper bag groceries come in, our groceries, wrapped meat wrapped up in a paper, brown wrapper and I’d save ever bit of that ’cause we didn’t have no writing paper around the house. Didn’t have money to buy it. And I’d take that and I remembered everything Daddy told me and I’d write the numbers and how to spell. He began to teach me how to spell dog and cat and our names and all this and that and I learned it all. I could just, I could just remember everything. Now this is every night. I’d want to go to bed sometimes, be tired from picking cotton. “No, you got to set up. You got to take—I got to give you another lesson.” Sometimes it’d be midnight before I’d get to go to bed. And so, anyway, then he started, “And I’m gonna teach you how to read. You got to take these letters that I told you to write and to learn and you got to learn how to put them together and make words out of them.” Well, that was a way off to me. I couldn’t figure that out. “Well, Daddy, I’ll never learn that.” “Yeah, you gonna have to learn to put all this together.” He taught me how to spell our names and ABCs. “Now, you got, you got to take this ABCs and you got to pick out certain letters and put them together and they’ll spell a word.” Well, it was all crazy to me. I couldn’t get it together. And I’d cry sometime and he’d say, “No, you can’t learn that way. You have got to learn to pick out these numbers out of the ABCs.” He’d write it on something and hold them up. “Now pick out what I tell you to spell your name. You pick a ‘R’ out. Pick out a ‘A’, ‘r’, and a ‘t’, and ‘i’, ‘e’.” And then he said, “I taught you how to make them. And now you write them on this piece of paper.” You talking about a hard way. And he wouldn’t let me go to bed till I would learn how to do that. And so that way it began to catch on. And I began to learn how to do all that.
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