| Summary: | (10:03) Ms. Sharp tells about the hard conditions her family lived with after their return to Alabama and the difficulties of working to help her daddy earn a living.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 4
Artie Sharp: Spring finally come and Eddie stayed with us. That old woman stayed with us. Mama couldn’t kick her out. She just had no place to go. So anyway, spring come and the hills was just full of wild huckleberries. Well, they begin to grow, you know, getting the fruit on the bushes and Mama knew about huckleberries. I didn’t. We come out of Arkansas; they don’t know nothing about huckleberries in Arkansas. So anyway, Mama’d say, “Get up on that hill and pick some of them green huckleberries and we’ll make a pie or we’ll cook them and eat them. We’ve got to have something to eat.” There was a thing a growing, I didn’t know about that till then but it was called tongue grass. It was a wild salad. And Mama’d tell us, “Take a knife,” and we’d grow it everywhere, “go out there on the hillside around the hog lot around the barn and take a knife and cut that tongue grass and we’ll cut that up and eat it.” Well, Mama'd do that and she’d melt lard when she had it sometime and just wilt it in the skillet and we’d eat that. And there was a greens that was growing around the barn that Mama’s mother told her to pick. It was called sour dock. There was a bitter dock and a sour dock and a sour dock had a green vein that run down through the big long leaves, so wide and so long, and it come up earlier than anything else. Well, Mama’d send me out and I’d get a dishpan full of that and we’d cook that. It was kindly slimy. But if you got one leaf of bitter dock in it, it’d mess up the whole pot. So I had to learn how to do that. So then huckleberries begin to get ripe and we begin to pick the huckleberries and we’d eat them and we didn’t have no sugar. That was out. We only bought, with what Daddy made, meal and flour and a little bit of lard and coffee and their snuff and tobacco. And that took what Daddy made. Two dollar and a half a week. Back then you could buy more, you know, than what you’d get now for the money. And so Daddy said, “Well, something’s gonna have to happen.” He said, “I’ve got to hire you out to people and let you start working for these people in this town here and help me make a living. I cannot make it. I can’t do it. We gonna starve to death.” Well he got me a job with a preacher and his wife. His wife had, they called it old heart dropsy then, they call it something else now. You swell up and you’ll bust open and die, you know, it’s caused from heart trouble. And I started living with this Preacher Morris and his wife. And, ah, he plowed, he plowed a field. There was a man, W.J. McMichael had a place and he’d rent sharecroppers and Preacher Morris worked for him, lived on his place and I stayed there, a dollar and a quarter a week. Night and day. That’s all I got. Twenty-five cents for twenty-four hours. And I’m a little girl and that woman swelled up and I had to take care of her when he was gone. She weighed about four hundred pounds. She set in a chair all the time and I didn’t know how to deal with her and had a big ol’ tub of ashes in the kitchen and me and him at night would get her in there and let her hump over the tub and go to the bathroom. Well, I had to live with that. I’d scoop it out during the day and take it out and I couldn’t sweep because she’d smother and I’d have to get down on my hands and knees and take a pan of water and a rag and mop up the dust. We lived out on an old dirt road, Bumpass Creek and mop up the dust and she couldn’t, “Oh, don’t you move a broom. Don’t move a rag. I’ll smother to death.” And I’d go to bed at night, the bed bugs would almost eat me up. And I’d get up the next morning and I’d look and there’d be blood spots all over the sheets where I’d slept and spots on me where the bed bugs was eating me up. Had ol’ shuck beds for beds. And I had to stay there day and night by the week; I stayed by the week. Daddy come on Saturday and collected my money. Well that two dollars and a half that I made that week and when I come to work I walked. Jack, how would be from up in the holler when we lived down from Preacher Morris’ place?
Jack Sharp: You talking about the Willie Woods Holler?
AS: Un-huh.
JS: Ah, it’s about three mile.
AS: I’d walk that to come to work and then every Friday I’d go back and I’d stay another week for two dollars and a half. And Daddy would be there to get that preacher to pay him and he’d take that two dollars and a half—I was helping him make a living. He’d get a big twenty-five pound sack of flour, eight pounds of lard and coffee and their snuff and tobacco. And that done it. That bought that. Well, I’m not worried about it. I mean I’m helping Daddy make a living and I was getting my food, my board there. They fed me pretty good but I’d do all the cooking. And I done the washing and cooking. Washed on the rub board. Carried the water from a creek to do the washing. So time moved on and she died and Daddy got me another job for an old woman, lived by herself. Her name was Surry Rogers and she also weighed about three hundred pounds. She set in a chair all the time in a little ol’ one room shack, ah, two room shack and cold winters back then. It’d be zero about all winter and everything froze hard. Well, guess who got to build the fire every morning. I crawled out of the bed, I had to get out there in the daytime and chop pine, old pine knots up and get enough stuff to build a fire next morning with matches. They just didn’t buy kerosene; it was only ten cents a gallon but they couldn’t buy it. They didn’t have no ten cents. And so I’d have to have all this shavings and kindling and pine piled up and wood there to build a fire and I had to get a fire going; we’d freeze to death if I didn’t. And we cooked on the heater. We didn’t have stove wood. Whatever fire we had on this little ol’ iron heater, I’d have to cook breakfast on that; fry everything. And take care of her and bathe her, not every day. She got it about once a week. And I’d have to sleep with her. Had one bed in the house. And I’d sleep way over on the far side as I could. And there was no such thing as powder; I wish it had been. I’d a doped her up every night, but she needed it. And so anyway, I lived, I just, it was a way of life. And one day, she’d send me down to Waterloo. From up there going up Teresa Lewis’ house to Waterloo it was at least a mile or more wasn’t it?
JS: Well, yeah, about a half a mile, I guess.
AS: Downtown Waterloo?
JS: Yeah, un-huh.
AS: Okay. She’d say, “Now, get up,” no matter how cold it was, “get up and you got to go to Waterloo and get us a little stuff.” Got no peddler, no nothing, you know, running—and I’d go down there and she’d buy a big stick of bologna. You’d get a big ol’ stick of bologna that long for forty-five cents. And it’s all I can do to carry it back. A little meal and a little flour and a little lard and a stick of bologna and I had to make that do us a week. And I’d make flour gravy and I don’t know how I got through it. I can’t tell you that. I lived from day to day doing that. And I’d say, “Aunt Surry, why don’t you hire somebody to get out here and chop up these old pine stumps? They hard; old ax dull. I can’t hardly chop it.” And I’m little and skinny. I weighed eighty-four pounds. I didn’t weigh that much then. About sixty pound then, I guess. But she wouldn’t. Finally, I talked a notion doing it and she hired a boy to come there and split kindling for us, split the pine. You chopping a pine stump, you got to know what pine stumps are. It’s like chopping a piece of cement almost. It’s hard. And so this boy come there—Jack, that was Paul Gean—and he come there and he split some, cut off some little slivers for me to build the fire and he thought he was gonna get paid pretty good and said, “Well I got that chopped and split Aunt Surry. What are you gonna give me?” “A nickel an hour,” she said. He never did come back. I had to do it. But spring come, I was there several years with her, and spring come and I’d build a fire out in the yard, build me up some rocks. You couldn’t have a fire in the house, honey. It’d run you out of the—hot summer till you couldn’t stand it. If you built a fire in the heater to cook, you would just suffocate. You couldn’t stand it. And so I’d build a fire outside. Put me a pile of rocks around, put a kettle up there. It was a big old pot. I’d put beans in that and cook a pot of beans or if she had some turnips, I’d cook some turnips, outside, while I’m raking the yard. And I’d try to plant a few flowers, you know, and kept that going. No garden, nothing. And some people, good folks, would bring us a little garden stuff and I’d cook it outside. And it was a nightmare.
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