Interview with Minnie S. Whitney, March 6, 1984

 HARDY: How old are you, Min?

MINNIE WHITNEY: 82.

HARDY: 82.

WHITNEY: I was 82 January the 18th. I was born 1902, January the 18th.

HARDY: Same age as my aunt, couple of months older, one month. And you come from the eastern shore of Virginia?

WHITNEY: Eastern shore of Virginia. Accomack County, the county was Accomack, and that's Eastern shore of Virginia.

HARDY: What did your parents do?

WHITNEY: They was sharecroppers. Where we come from they was farmers. Papa raised everything that we ate. Even the cows, hogs, chickens and he raised corn that you could make corn meal out of bread. And everything else. He didn’t have to go to the store and buy too many. He raised the potatoes, two kinds; greens, beans, cabbage, everything. And also strawberries, he had that. And when 00:01:00I was a kid, we used to, what they call, blueberries now [ ] blueberries, they used to grow wild and we’d go through the woods and pick them. In the summertime, you had to be careful otherwise a snake would drop down on your head! [laughter] Well I will say my life with my parents it wasn’t too hard because see, my father was, he was a good sharecropper. And the children that come up with those parents that had a farm, you didn't know too much about hard times, like for food and clothes because two things: my father always made up his mind to do. He was going to feed us, and give us some clothes on our backs even if it was something that was left over from somebody else that my mother would fix it. But I see so many that was rougher than I was. Because their 00:02:00parents wasn’t progressive to go out and they just live for whatever the white man would say, “Well come and work for me, and I’ll give you this and I’ll give you that.” They lived for that. They didn't try to make a farm for anything for themselves. But my father always kept hogs and kept a cow for milk. And they had horses to truck the farm. Now, like I said for myself, I worked in the farm with my father. I trucked the farm. If when he got up in the morning at 6:00 and started in the field at 6:00, I was right with him. We’d work until, how he used to tell the time, he’d look up in the sky, he says, “12:00, take the horse out and ride him to the house if you want to on his back or walk him there and we’ll go eat dinner.” We’d be, the house we stayed there for one hour, we’d have our dinner, we’d come back at 1:00 and start all over again 00:03:00and we work until it was so dark that we could, just could see out each one of us in the field. As long as there was any light, and I was, I did that, I started doing that when I was about seven years old... workin’ in the farm. So when I became ten my father hired me like a boy to work for him. That was ‘round the clock. I couldn't even... he said go, you go. When he say get up, we get up and go. I worked with him at everything with plowing, cultivating, what we call... you have a pound where they... I don’t guess you ever been to the South and seen people with these horses that pounds it when [ ] gone by. But they call it pound, they call it manure, where you keep, horses stand. [ ] 00:04:00We’d dig that, then we load it in the cart and carry it out on the field and you spread it around. That was to fertilize the ground for the plants. Now like in February, I didn't have too much time in school. I had to go to school in the first of November. Then I’d go to school, then they had for the holiday Thanksgiving. Then I go back to school until Christmas. That was always a week Christmas vacation. I’d start back to school in January and the last day of January, if it was a warm day, my father would take me out of school and I’d have to break the ground for planting potatoes. When I was growing up, in February, all of our white potatoes was planted. And potatoes for planting, 00:05:00sweet potatoes, we had them in a bed what they call like a bed about this wide and this long with glass frames over it. There we made those potatoes for to make sprouts. We’d pull them up and then we’d plant them in the field. When I first started, I was big enough to know what, I used to drop the sprouts for somebody to come along behind me and put ‘em in the ground. But in later years, I guess about, I guess I was about 12 then when they would, one man, white man, would buy a transplant. That's where two people would sit on and one man drive. They’d drive that and they would go from one person to another. My father, he would rent it for a day. Now sometime he would plant so many, so many acres of land if he got the sprouts. It was two people that worked with that. 00:06:00That helped us from walking and so many people, it wouldn't take so many people for the plant, one acre of land. Then when we got to planting the sprouts, they come out [ ] in March, and we start setting out the potato sprouts in April, then after that in June, last of May, we would be getting ready to dig some white potatoes sometimes... June and July. But starting in April, we had to pick strawberries. That was the season. The season come behind after you plant and then the strawberries come, and then after the strawberry pickin’, then you come with the white potatoes and other things.

HARDY: So you went to school from November to the end of January?

WHITNEY: That was just about all. Then I was out. And whatever education that I did get, my little sister, she was going to school, the teacher would send the work home and I’d do my work home and send it back and she’d correct it. That's the way I kept up. That was as much of education that I did and that wasn't too much.

HARDY: How many kids were there?

WHITNEY: Well, it was, when I was growing up at home then, because, see, two of them was born after I left, there was four of us home then. It was two boys and two girls.

HARDY: Was that typical to have the girls out in the field?

WHITNEY: If he didn't have no boys, that was the farmer’s, that was the rule down there. If they didn’t have no boys, the girls had to take the boys’ place. And I was one of the oldest ones. So I had, the boys come along after my baby sister growed up. They growed up together. Now she didn’t work hard in the fields. I did because the boys, that was, to fill in. But see, my father and 00:08:00mother had girls first and those girls had to do the work because he couldn't afford to hire another man somewhere, you know, to come and work for him because he wasn't making enough money ‘cause the boys would have to get the money out the crop. And even at that time, when a boy come to work for them, they’d have to… there would be a, you know, like boys that didn’t have a family like there should be, he would have to pay them $15 a month for work and then feed them and give ‘em some clothes. So you see, my father couldn't afford it. His farm wasn’t big enough.

HARDY: What were your parents’ attitudes towards education? What were your parents’ attitudes towards educating their kids?

WHITNEY: Their attitudes?

HARDY: Yeah, how did they feel about it? Did they feel bad that they had to keep you in the fields or was it [ ]?

WHITNEY: No. They felt bad about it. But there was nothing else they could do. 00:09:00They tried, so many times as my father could get me out to go, he would do… try to do most of the work himself, but it was too much for him. They felt bad about it alright, but there was nothing else they could do ‘cause all the parents was doin’ the same thing. The only children that went to school the term season was the white people’s kids ‘cause see, sometimes the white people would hire the boys out from the colored people and put ‘em in the farm working, their boys went to school. So you see, we was just, it was like we said, we was deprived of a lot of things that we should’ve had. But it wasn't due to our parents, [ ] mine. ‘Cause my father, he really wanted us to get educated because he’d sit up night and day with us to make me learn my lesson and I’d have to get sleeping, but he’d say, “You gonna learn this lesson.” So that's just the way this life was. And I was growed up, I was on a 00:10:00farm and worked like that till I was 16 and a half.

HARDY: Till you were 16?

WHITNEY: And a half.

HARDY: What sort of rent did he pay to… he was a sharecropper, a tenant farmer, right? How much would the rent take out of what he could produce?

WHITNEY: Well see, at the end of the year, [ ] whatever come, after they take out all expense like the fertilizer, and all the things that they was supposed to have, then whatever monies was left [ ], then they got so much. If it was $300, maybe my father, after everything was taken out, he made clear that year, I heard him say when I was a small kid, he said to my mother, he says, “You know, I did pretty good this year.” So she says, “Yeah?” He said, “Everything is paid off, I don't owe nobody, and I paid for my fertilizer for next year,” and he says, “I got $50 put in the bank.” Well he look like he thought that was a good time! You save $50 now, it’s nothing! So that’s what 00:11:00he say. So I guess when they say sharecroppers, whoever you work for, they had you through the summer while your crop was on. Then at the end of the year, you didn’t pay for nothin’ then, but when you finish reaping your crop, then they went to town and they sit down with the book and figure out how much you owe and how much you pay there, then that's the way they, it was shared. They give them so much and what could they do? And sometimes I'm sure that they didn't give them what it really should have been. But we managed.

HARDY: How did your father and your family feel about that sort of life?

WHITNEY: Well, I’ll tell you. You see, my father, his mother and father both were slaves. And my mother’s father and mother both were slaves. See, my mother's mother came out… my mother came, her mother hadn’t been freed too 00:12:00long. She was still living kind of under the bondage of that slavery. You know there was a rule they say that whatever the white man would tell them, they believed him. And if he says, “Well you didn't earn but $5, this year,” they believed him. So see they, some of them still was livin' under their bondage of slavery. But they, I never heard ‘em complain. If they did, I didn't know it because sometime I used to see my father look very downhearted and I would hear him tell my mother, he said, “Gee, I won’t be able to do this year what I did for the kids last year for Christmas, you know.” Like if the crop was bad or something like that. So it was that way with all of the colored people. They 00:13:00was still in bondage. What I call bondage, they was still livin’ under some of the slave rules. And they had a rule down there, you could go in town. And sometime my father used to go in town during the week, and he would, before we’d eat dinner and sometime I would be hungry. So he’d say, “Well I’ll go around the back to this restaurant,” we wasn’t allowed to go around the front. He’d said, “And I’ll get you a sandwich.” He’d go around the back and they’d give him a sandwich through the window, I don’t care how cold it was, he would eat it on the sidewalk. Or you couldn't go inside. So they had been used to it, they were brought up that way and they didn't know no better. But see, when I came along after I left home, I went back and I told them, I said, “Things has gotta to be changed because this is not fair.” Then I start showing my father where if he was going to farm, pay him so much a 00:14:00year for the farm and whatever he made, it would be his own. So he started out with it, but my father at that time, I guess it happened about 10 years and then my father passed, ‘cause he had, he got too old to farm and he just passed on. So I wouldn't go down there and work in the farm no more. After I left, I’d go there and see them because one vacation time I was down there standin' on my porch and the white man came up and said to my father, “I want some of your people to come to pick strawberries for me.” So papa told him, he says, “I don’t have any,” he said, “My boys is working and I need them.” So he looked at one point and he said, “What about her? That’s one of your gals?” Papa said, “But she don't live here.” So he says, “What's the difference?” And that’s when I opened up my mouth and I said, “No indeed!” I says, “I don't live here no more. I was born here, but I, I was 00:15:00partly raised here,” I said, “but I don’t come down here to work.” I said, “’Cause I could give you a job where I am.” So my father heard me back on, up to Philadelphia, and he said, “Don't talk like that when you come down here,” because I know if I’d said too much my father would’ve got hurt. So it was one of those things that was hard. It wasn't hard. See, now I look back on it, at the time when I was there, it didn’t seem hard. But since I growed up and left home and seen how they had to work and how they was so put down, then I said to myself, I said, really I was a slave too. I didn’t know no difference. I said, the way I worked and the way I couldn’t share in nothin'. You go in the store to buy something and you weren’t allowed to try it on whether it was small or large. My father bought many pairs of shoes for me by measuring my foot. Two sticks, one this way width and the length. And 00:16:00sometime you would measure, the shoe’d be too small and you couldn’t take it back. Once you bring them out the store, that’s it. So, you know, that was just, I’ll say, “This is kind of rough, you know.” ‘Cause sometime, you can buy something in the store right now and you get home and you try it on, and you don’t like it or there’s something wrong with it somewhere you find out, you can take it back. It would be very bad today if you couldn’t take things back. Sometime you get things in the store, so I don’t know that life was just… I see a lot of people are just different, I guess. My father was a sharecropper and he believed in working, so it made it a little bit different for me.

HARDY: What were some of the other sorts of slave rules that had sort of carried over that you grew up with? Surrounded you… social sorts of things and…

WHITNEY: Oh, you wasn't allowed to, you wasn’t allowed to go into the 00:17:00churches, the white churches. You wasn’t allowed in churches. You couldn’t go in the schools that they set aside. If you got… Well I didn’t live where busses were, but I know if you go to the fairs where they had, you could not go in and go up on the ground. You could go in and stand outside and see what you want to see, you couldn’t go inside and take a... But yet they could come into our annual fair ground and go all around and do anything they wanted to do, but we wasn’t allowed.

HARDY: So you’re saying at the fairs you weren’t allowed to go onto the grounds?

WHITNEY: No, not on the ground. You could stay down, what they called “down by the woods.” You couldn’t participate in none of the activities there. If you want somethin', you go buy it and take it back in the woods or wherever you be and eat it. So there was a lot of things that we couldn’t take part in.

HARDY: Now, your grandparents then were slaves and so your parents really were 00:18:00first generation free and you all were second generation. And I would think the way generations work, it’s always the second generation growing up not having experienced the hardships of the previous one has different attitudes and ideas about how things work. When you were a kid, when you were a young woman, before you came north, did you and your friends, you know the people around you, feel any differently about things than your parents did? Different attitudes about… a little more militant or angry?

WHITNEY: We would get angry! We would say like sometime it would be an excursion from Virginia to Ocean City, Maryland... that was the only activity away from Virginia we had, that’s why we come up, but we only had certain spots to go. And then, the way the white man would say, we’d even bought our tickets to go to Ocean City for a day out. And if the white man come over and tell the 00:19:00parents, “Well they can’t go, I want ‘em in my field that day.” Then we couldn’t go. Then we would get together on Sunday where we meet, we say a whole lot of things what we wished we could do. And say when we do get grown we going to do something. But I didn’t. But some of them did go back and do some of the things they say they would do, but I didn't because I always thought about my parents. And I know, if I did something that wasn't right down there to them people, or say too many things, they would get my father because I know my father had problems there because one of our relatives lived in the city, rent home, and made a, you know, he made a remark that we shouldn’t say “Yes, sir and no, sir.” They said, they’re not your father so why should you say it. And he went in town and he just went on and told just what he thought about it. 00:20:00He said, “I'm as good as you is, only my skin is black.” Says, well then another thing, he says, to the lambs they gave wool and to the dogs he gave hair. And I know my father was coming home from town and some of the white people out there knowed he was a friend of my father’s, knew he was part of the family, and take a pair of steel knuckles and hit my father up the side of the head with it.

HARDY: Just because he knew him…

WHITNEY: Just because he was part of the family, because he talked like that, but he didn’t live there. So that’s why I said I was very careful, of what I did because I didn’t want my parents to get hurt. I swallowed many things when I was going back and forth there on the [ ] that I didn’t want my parents to get hurt. Because they would hurt them, they would hurt them. If they would even go out and kill some of their fowl or shoot their cows or horses. They’d 00:21:00do anything then. But I’m telling those, those southern people, them white southern people where I came from, they were rough. If they meet you on the road and if you, if it was a road and you had to go by, it was real small. If you was there first, you better wait till they come by driving a horse or something like that. It’s just something that now I’m beginning to understand how I felt about it. And I always said if I had knowed then what I know now, I guess I wouldn’t be here. Because you know if you speak out, you get hurt. So…

HARDY: Now Virginia has a reputation too of being a much better state than Georgia, or Alabama, or Mississippi…

WHITNEY: But like I said, we only had a little, slight little bit of the slavery 00:22:00part. But I was in Georgia in ‘60 and I found out that it had already changed up in Virginia. There, there was only certain places we could go when we went to Georgia. With me, I had gotten used to sitting, I said, “Why we couldn’t go in there?” And they said, “Don’t you see the sign up there?” It says: “No Niggers Allowed There.” And I says, “Oh,” and when I went in the store, I was just as ornery as I could be because I said I wouldn’t live down here. You know, they still had places that you were Jim Crow-ed. And they tell me there’s still some down there now. I don’t know, but I don’t guess it’s so much. But at my home, it's cleared up so that you can go in any place you wanna go. My sister plays in a white church. The Methodists and them have come together and they go places together. We had a white preacher in my church 00:23:00for about two years. I call it my church, I was born and raised in in Bayside, Virginia. For two years he was there. You see the Methodists changes minister, they’re not like the Baptists.

HARDY: This was when you were young, there was a white minister?

WHITNEY: No, after I left so I went back to visit my sister. And I said it’s much better now than it was then because the white people had gotten more together. You could go in any place. Before, you couldn’t go in a drug store and you could buy ice cream, but you had to come outside to eat it. So now you can go in and you can sit down and eat, you can eat anywhere in those places, anywhere you want, and they will not tell you to go out. It's changed so much.

HARDY: What are your fondest memories of growing up on a farm, or in that area? That period in the nation’s history, in that part of the country?

WHITNEY: What is my best experience, you say?

HARDY: Best memories, your fondest memories of those days…

WHITNEY: Well, my fondest memories was when the weekend would come and we was able to go to church on Sundays. And sometimes on Saturdays, my father would take us to town and spend a couple hours there walking into the stores, and looking and coming out. And just stand there in the streets in the town because it was something that we didn’t see every day. And then he would take us out to the station and let us see the trains go by. We had trains around there. So that was kind of amusement for us. And then when the circus would come, that was another something new we had never seen. ‘Cause we’d never seen any 00:25:00elephants and any deers or anything at my home where I came from... but you seen plenty of snakes... something I didn’t like! So those things was about, I’d say about the most interesting things, when Sunday come, weekend come. We knowed we was goin' to church and was goin’ to be something different, we knowed we was going to eat something different that we didn’t eat the whole week. And it was just like, and then people would get together and they’d have a little picnic and we’d do things like that. That was my fondest thing that I enjoyed when I was growing up, that we’d get together with my girlfriends. ‘Cause see, during the week, maybe from, if it was some bad weather, we wouldn’t see each other sometimes for a whole month! ‘Cause when the weather’s bad, we didn’t go out. So this was just about it because there wasn’t too much around there to be fond of. The Bible was our onliest book that we had to look 00:26:00at on Sundays. There wasn't no papers, we didn’t have no papers. My mother didn’t allow us to use our schoolbooks on Sunday. If you read a book, you better read the Bible, so that's all. It wasn’t nothing too exciting. One day was just like the other too. And sometimes I used to hate to see Sunday come... but I enjoyed it [ ]. Because so many things that I could do that one day during the week when I was home that I wasn't allowed to do on Sundays.

HARDY: I could see how it was a very simple life like that, that Sunday in particular was offered, how the change would be...

WHITNEY: That was a Sabbath day and we had to keep it holy, that’s the way my mother would tell us. And see, during the weekdays, on Sundays, you couldn’t even drive a nail if the fence broke down. You better prop it up because she wouldn’t allow you to nail it up. She was very religious and she was just that 00:27:00way, and you wasn’t able to do those things.

HARDY: What were the church services like?

WHITNEY: We had Sunday school, Sunday mornings, 9:00. That would last until about 10 or 10:30. 11:00 would be our Sunday service. And then we wouldn’t get out then till about 1:00. Sometimes when you’d go to church, you ‘d be there almost all day long. So that was the way the service... Then 1:00, then we’d come back to church around 5:00 for something they called B.Y.P.U. We’d read Bible verses and sing hymns and things like that, and that was all. That was the other Sunday service, that was every Sunday.

HARDY: Did you find, were services, the preaching style in particular... in your 00:28:00church at home, much different from the preaching style you found in Philadelphia when you came?

WHITNEY: Well, I did. Because I always said those preachers that preached there were old time preachers. Some of them couldn’t even read and write good, but they was called by God. And they would tell you where to find the text and close the Bible up and preach a sermon out of this world. But then I left home and came to the city. I went to a church and I seen a man, he took his text and then he was reading his script, so I couldn’t get used to that when I first came here. I was used to them closing the Bible up and go ahead and preach, if you’re a preacher. So then I said, I didn’t think they were “called.” They went to school and got educated for it. When you’re called to do something, you’ll do it well. But if you studied, you gotta study mighty hard 00:29:00to prove that people don’t know what you are.

HARDY: Let me ask you one more question about the South, then we’ll start moving you up into Philadelphia. Can you describe your house?

WHITNEY: The house that we lived in at home? Well it was a six-room house. It was made just like a barn. And you come in the front door and you go upstairs and you walk through every room. No rooms was private, but the last room. That was private. That was my mother and father’s room. Downstairs, you come in, enter the dining room and then what they used to call parlors. That was private, 00:30:00but before the young man that’d come to see the girl, before he could get by, he had to pass by all the parents and the children. And then the kitchen was made on the other end, what they call the parlor on one end, and the kitchen on the other end, the dining room was in the middle. It was high up, you had to go up some steps to get in the house. And that’s about all, they had this old fashioned wood stove. And a cook stove and a wood stove for heat. You had to be very careful when you light the fire, if a spark would fly on the roof, you could get burned down. That's the onliest house that I remember. My mother say I was born in that house and then I went back and I growed up and I lived into it. Because we moved from there after we was there till I was about five years old. 00:31:00They moved down, way down in what we call down in the neck of the woods, way down near the river. You didn’t see nobody but yourself there unless you come out to the road. And after that, we stayed down there till I guess I was about seven years old, then we move back on the farm where I was born and that’s where we stayed until I left home.

HARDY: There was no electric, no phone?

WHITNEY: No no, no phone, no electric. I didn’t even know what a phone looked like until I came to the city. There was no phones, if a person get sick at night, I’d seen my father many nights jump on his horse’s back, or the mule, and ride to town to get a doctor. And the doctor had some, at that time, the doctor came out in a horse and buggy, he didn’t have no car.

HARDY: Did you see any movies? Do you remember the first movie you saw? They had movies down there…?

HARDY: So how did you get up to Philadelphia then?

WHITNEY: You want to know the truth? Tell you the truth? I ran away. My parents never let me... you know like, it was very hard for me to get away and I was still workin' on the farm, and I got tired. They allowed me to have company. And one night my friend came, boyfriend came, and he got there before I got out of the field. And I had to run in the back way and run up the stairs. My mother had invited him in the house, and I had to run upstairs and get washed up and get dressed and come down and entertain him. And I said, “Now this don’t make sense. I’m a big grown woman.” At that time I felt that I was a woman, and I 00:33:00couldn’t see nothin’ no more that I was still going to be on that farm workin’ like that. It looked like there was no boys to be hired then because some of the boys that he could’ve had was in the service. So in May one night, my father and I, we were going to church, and I was playing for a cake walk… they used to have cake walks back then. That’s the way they used to have, you know, make money in the church. So I was playing one for one of the cake walks, so I told my uncle to tell my father that I had gone back home because I had a headache. And my cousin, he helped get one of the fellas that had a fast horse to take me to the station. So seeing my father came up, I went on over ahead of him. When he came up, he went on to church, so he said to my uncle, he says, 00:34:00“Where is Minnie?” So he said, “She went back home,” said, “she said she had a headache.” So he went on to church because he wasn't thinking. So after the service was all over, that had give me all the chance I want to get away. So he went back home after he had finished the [ ] and when he went home, he goes in the house and my mother looks up at him and says, “Where is Minnie?” So he said, “Ain’t she home?” And she said, “No.” He says, “Well she left and said she had a headache and she was coming back home,” said, “I knowed she act all day like she didn’t feel good.” So she said, “Well she not home,” so then my older sister had been away and she had come back home, you know, wasn’t gonna tell me how to live. So my father says… No she said, “Oh, I bet she runned away,” said, “I bet she's on that 9:00 train.” So papa heard and he went and got the horse and was going to head me off at the station. So I went on to the station and passed my father on the 00:35:00road, and they were going to church. But they didn’t know who it was. They didn’t see me because I was hid back in the horse and buggy. So well, he went on there, so he said, “I’ll go get George Mason,” well at that time one of the men just had gotten a call [ ]. Then Pop said to him, he says, “Go up and get him.” He says, “Well my car just blowed a tire and it take me so long to fix it up.” He said, “But just a minute, I'll put on an old one and I’ll drive you to Parksley.” Well when he was leaving at the yard, he heard the train blowing at Parksley, but they know there was nowhere’s else to get off, they just called it quits. Well I say, if they come there, they wouldn’t have found me anyway because when the train pull into Parksley, I went into the ladies’ room and stayed there until the train pulled off. If anybody at that 00:36:00time would get on the train, they wasn't allowed to go in the ladies room, you know if they’re looking for somebody. So I got on just like any ordinary person, so I come to Pocomoke, that was a city… Pocomoke, Maryland. So then the next day I caught the 1:00 train to come up here to Philadelphia to my cousin. He lived right over here at 4115 Warwick Street. The place is all torn down now. He wanted to know when he met me, I had told him, but his wife, she knew what I had did, but my cousin didn’t know. So when he met me he said, “Where is your suit case?” I said, “I don’t have any.” He said, “Well what you do, check it up?” I said, “Oh, it will be here.” So he says, “Alright!” So he’s taking my word for it. So he says, after we get into the house, he said, “That’s funny, you didn’t bring no clothes, no nothin’?” I said, “No,” I says, so Mahelia up the stairs, she said, “I’m gonna tell you the truth,” she said, “Honey, Minnie ran away.” He 00:37:00said, “I knew it. You can’t blame her,” said, “After all she is a woman, she don't feel like workin’ out there in that field.” He said, “Yes, but I wish she had told me,” he said. “Now I get to have an argument with my Aunt.” I said, “You don’t have to argue with her... just if they write up here, just don’t tell them where I am.” So he went on from that. And that next day Mahelia had a job for me. I worked at 41st and Girard Avenue for the druggist there called was Egendorfs, right on the corner of Girard, 41st and Girard. Then I wrote home and told my parents that I was in Philadelphia but please don’t try to find me because I would not come back home. I was grown then and I could talk as big as I wanted and not get hurt. So I told them if 00:38:00they wanted to write to me, write to McKinley, but I wasn’t with him, but he knows where I am. So I wrote back and papa hired a detective from down home, or what we call a sheriff, he come up here and he looked for me. And he had my picture and he was talking to me and didn’t even know who I was because I changed myself, my looks. When I came up I had bobbed hair and I had real eyebrows up here and I didn’t wear no lipstick. There, I had made myself like the ladies in the city with my hair done up on my head and lipstick and eyebrows arched. So he was holding up and he said, “Have you seen this girl here?” I says, “No.” He said, “She ran away from home,” said, “And if you do, this is Tom Savage’s daughter,” said, “would you please get in touch with me?” and he give me the card that he was living at Tracy Hotel and I said, 00:39:00“Alright, I certainly will.” Then my landlady she founded out what was, she says, “Well you just as well stay down home because I’m gonna be just as hard on you up here as your parents were.” I go out, and 10:00 I had to be in the house, hot summer nights. 9:30 she’d look out the window. And you couldn’t leave, I had to stay in the eyesight of her. And I’m grown now. But I appreciated it. After a while, my father and mother seen that I wasn't coming back. I started sending them money. All you do is send them money, then you can buy them off! So I started sending them little money, like couple dollars every week. I was making eight and I’d give them two. I would pay $2 rent. I used to eat on the job, I didn’t have to worry about nothing to eat at home. So that's the way I lived and I saved up a few dollars. Then I became engaged and got married in August and that was my history of my beginning to Philadelphia.

HARDY: What did you know about the city? When you came up?

WHITNEY: Nothing, I had never been there before.

HARDY: Did you have any expectations about what it would be like?

WHITNEY: No, I tell you the truth… come right out tell you the truth, I just wasn’t smart enough to even think what it would be like. I didn’t have the slightest idea because, you see, a lot of children have dreams and my dreams was that I would grow up at home, have a big house, and six kids and be, you know, like the farmer’s wife and I would be taking care of the children while he was in the field making the living. That was my dream. But when I found out that, began to see that my dream wasn’t coming true, and I was gonna still work ‘cause my mother told me, “You’ll never marry until you’re 21 years 00:41:00old.” And I said, “Oh my goodness, there’s too many years, I realized that that was too many years that I had to stay under bondage of the family, so I left. But I had never dreamed enough about being in the city. Never gave the city a thought. I just dreamed about a nice, big eight-room house down in the country with a big porch around it and that was my dream. And when I came to the city, this was like something new. I had to learn my way around and everything looked so funny to me. Because if I hadn’t ran away from home, I hated the place so bad, if I hadn’t ran away I would’ve run right back home. But my mother told me that if any of her children run away, she was going to kill them. So I had to take it from there and I stayed and I made the best of it, and after awhile, I got used to it.

HARDY: So you say you didn’t like the city when you came here?

WHITNEY: No. I stayed here, when I came here, it was only streetcars running. 00:42:00And I had, then I got a job working in Wynnefield. And you get up in the morning and if the Number 10 would get stuck up the front, you better get out and start walking if you wanted… I walked to Wynnefield many a morning from 52nd Street to Wynnefield. Because the streetcars, there was nothing else to take you out there. There was no cars, there was very few automobiles. So you either walked or you may lose your job. But them people was wealthy out there too in Wynnefield, those people. So now I guess I like Philadelphia… like it that, well I wouldn’t go back to my home and live there no more because t's a lot of things down there that I couldn’t get used to no more.

HARDY: One of the things that really interests me is during the war years, 00:43:00you’re getting all these people coming up straight off the farms in overalls and speaking differently, having no idea of what they’ll see. I’m wondering, do you remember what were the most difficult things to adjust to? I guess you were a “greenhorn” coming into this, what made a greenhorn stand out? How did you adjust?

WHITNEY: All people that knew, well they’d look at you and they would say, “Oh, she's from the South,” or “She’s a dummy,” or would say something like that. And the white people would look at you and they’d tell you in a minute, that “I know you're from down south because from your speech, your dialect.” Then from the way you act because you were used to getting, say, going and drawing water. Here they had spigots for the water to come through. 00:44:00You was used to getting, in the south, you’d get a tub and get a bath on Saturday nights. You washed the rest of the week, but Saturday night that big tub was in the house to get a bath. So when you come to the city, you did that, when you come to the city. And that's when people know that, “ Well, I know she’s from the South because otherwise, she wouldn’t be going to get a tub to get a bath in.” Because one house I did live in, 4115 Walnut Street, they had just a face bowl in there, no bath and they didn’t have any commode upstairs, so you had to come downstairs and go out in the backyard. So that didn’t bother me because I was used to that. But so many things that people would look at you and tell you that they knew you was from the South. It was the 00:45:00way you wore your clothes or the way you act… a lot of things, that’s the way they tell you’re from the South because it’s like now, I see quite a few people come from… I don’t know where they come from… I’ll say from the West Indies or other places like that, and I look at them and I realize, so they’re from the country, or they’re from some other place because the ways in their actions. They have to get used to it. I had to get used to knowing how the people ate up here. Down my home, where I come from, our dinner was 12:00. Our breakfast including eggs, bacon, and sometimes we call it side meat, and sometime my mother would have fish, broiled mackerel or fried fish. And then dinner was beans, cornbread, and a big meat. They didn’t have too many things, 00:46:00beans weren’t the side dish, that was your regular meal. Then nighttime maybe she’d make some pancakes or waffles or something and syrup. So I was used to that way of eating. So when I come up here and they start telling me about dinner at night… I said, “Dinner?” I said, “That's in the middle of day! When we eat our dinners…” So I had to get adjusted to what they had for lunch and what they called dinner at night. And so many things it was hard for me to get adjusted to. I didn’t know how to cook. I know how to cook the southern way. But I didn’t know... when I took a job I shouldn’t have did it... housework that included cooking and everything. And the woman left, she went to a football game and left an eggplant for me to cook. I didn’t know. It was a good thing that she come back in time. I put it on the stove in a pot of water. So she told me, “Put it on about 4:00.” So when she come in she says, 00:47:00“Where’s the eggplant?” I said, “On the stove.” And she got there just in time. It just had started to cook. She said, “No, it's got to be peeled and sliced and dipped in egg batter.” Then she found out that I wasn’t a cook. So she said, “Why didn’t you tell me you don’t know how to cook?” I could fry meat and make pork chops and things like that my way. Like beans, she liked them as a side dish but I used to make them in soup. So you put it in a big dish and that was the meal. So she said, “If you are willing to learn, I’ll teach you,” and she learned me. But it was so many things that, I know I stood out, that they knew I was from the country. Because Mrs. Egendorf, she told me like this, she says, “I know you're from the South,” she says, “But don't worry about it,” she says, “I like to get the little greenhorns.” She says, “Then I can learn ‘em my way so that they’re easy 00:48:00to train.” Well I didn’t know how to eat the Jewish food, but I found out. Like the time I was hired, I didn’t eat nothin’ but their food. And I become accustomed of it. So many things that I had to get adjusted to…

HARDY: Can you give me some other examples? This is fascinating because you’re the first person I’ve talked to who could really tell me in detail just what some of those adjustments were…

WHITNEY: Well, I had to get used to the telephone. I didn’t know how to talk on the telephone. I had to learn that. And to take orders. Like in the house where I was working, no… in the drugstore… they would call there for such 00:49:00and such a person, I didn’t know how to write down the name and different things, then you had to… the telephone, then you had to give the, like it was Cathedral or Auburn, or all of that… you had to call, and I didn’t know how to do it. And sometime I would want their number and I didn’t know what to do. So I stopped calling on telephones unless someone would dial the number for me or, you know, call it for me ‘cause there wasn’t no dial... you just called the number and the operator’d give it to you. So that was hard for me to get adjusted to. And it was a long time, I think it was maybe quite a few years before I got adjusted to, till they started to dial and then also I got adjusted to the telephone. And… I don’t know too much more.

CR: How about socially? Like the way people acted or behaved towards one another?

WHITNEY: Well, I’m glad you brought it up. Sometimes you’d be out of there and you have someone that you think you was friends and you go out with them and then, when they found out you’re a greenhorn, they all go off in their little corner, and you’d be standing by yourself. That’s the way when you first come here because you aren’t one of them till you learn. And that would be very uncomfortable. Somebody’d take you somewhere and then they’d go off with their little group and you standing by yourself and don’t know anybody else to talk to and it was very hurting. And I got to a place where I wouldn’t go, I wouldn’t go out with the girls.

HARDY: Ok with the girls, because you were southern and didn’t know how to act…

WHITNEY: So when I would go out, after I’d met Fred, I would go out because I 00:51:00knew he was gonna be with me all the time. And I’d meet the other people there and after they seen that I had a friend, then they all think, “Well she’s not as green as we thought she is.” This one girl said, “Well you too dumb to even get a boyfriend up here.” The way I act, I was the kind… I didn’t do much talking. I listened because my speech, which is not none too good now, I was afraid to talk because I didn’t know where to put the words. Because if you don’t have the schooling like you should, it's very hard for you to meet with people and get with people in talking and feel comfortable. I went to school five years after I left home but not here. I went in New York to school there. I went to Wardley High. That’s where I got… most of the little education that I did get, I was able to graduate there from the sixth grade. But 00:52:00still, it’s not enough. I still could use more, but now I feel at this age, it’s too hard.

HARDY: You seem to have gotten by this long, this far, right?

WHITNEY: Yes, so far I’ve gotten by.

HARDY: Then, that was something… I was talking to some fellas this past summer who talked about the difference in dating, what then was the difference in women. Down south, you try and go out with a girl and there was the father and there were the brothers, and you touched her, and they were gonna chase you with a shotgun and up here, everything’s wide open.

WHITNEY: That’s right. But that’s the truth, in the South, that if a fellow come to take a girl out, if you had a little sister, little brother, he had to take them too. You couldn’t go with anyone by yourself, weren’t allowed. Here they don’t… well, I tell ya, I just as well been home because that Aunt Susie that I roomed with… the fellow I met, which is my kids’ father, I married him… he come to take me to Woodside one time so she told him, “You 00:53:00better have her back here by 8:00, otherwise I don’t let her in the house,” and I didn’t know where I was gonna stay. Sometimes Woodside Park cars would be so crowded you had to kill yourself to get on there. She always had, when I’d go, she’d always say, “Mahelia, you go with her,” that was my cousin. So I says, “I don’t want her out here by herself.” So Mahelia, she would go but I’d never see her till it was time for me to come back. She’d said, “You’re big enough to take care of yourself.” But that was Aunt Sue's idea, long as we come back together, it was alright. It was hard to really adjust myself to the city, to Philadelphia and to the work, ‘cause you worked. I worked for a woman out in Wynnefield, she had me out on the roof. She had, you 00:54:00know, the porch and then she had these windows come out on the porch right out on the roof. She put me out there and as I wiped the windows, the rag was sticking to the windows, it was freezing. When it was time for… cleaning time, she never had to close the windows and clean house. Because she had a house like this. She washed half of the walls this week and dust now the other half. Every week, that’s when you do housecleaning. Wash the walls, now that’s the kind of thing, she had the ceiling and everything. You had a ladder there to stand up on.

HARDY: That doesn’t sound like it was a common practice.

WHITNEY: No. That was just her idea of doing those things. That’s the way she kept her house.

HARDY: When you came to the City, first thing you did was work in the pharmacy. 00:55:00How long did you stay there?

WHITNEY: I stayed there ‘bout two years. ‘Cause I got married while I was working there, and I took off I guess two months and I went back, worked again during that time…

HARDY: And then what did you do, what was your next…?

WHITNEY: Then I went back to the South to live…

HARDY: With your husband? Tell me about your husband.

WHITNEY: He worked for the city. He was a man who stand about 6' 2" and heavy built. And in other words, after he married... the boys in the country, he was from down in Virginia too... they had the idea that they didn’t want the wife 00:56:00to work. So I stayed home until we decided to come back to the city again and I got a job to work. We stayed down home about two years.

HARDY: So when you got married, the two of you went right back down south? Did he farm?

WHITNEY: No, no, no. He worked for a sharecropper. He got paid a salary. He worked for a farmer and he had to get a salary and he said that was enough that we could live from without me going out to work. He needed me in the house to cook and keep the house clean. And then we had a couple of kids and I had to stay home with them, so it wasn't too much with that because our marriage didn’t last too long. But we was happy while we was together. But it’s just something that I don’t talk about. We just didn’t make it. But we remained 00:57:00good friends all the time.

HARDY: So you came back to the city?

WHITNEY: Yeah, I came back to the city and I stayed here I guess about a year and then I went to New York.

HARDY: What did you do during that year in Philadelphia?

WHITNEY: I did housework.

HARDY: You had your kids with you?

WHITNEY: Nope, my kids was... My mother had one and his sister had the other because we went to court for the kids. The court would only grant me the boy. They wouldn’t let me have both of them and he had the girl. But I seed my daughter every week because I stayed here until she was a good-sized girl. My son, he was home with my mother. And I always sent him clothes, they kept in touch, and I wrote to him every week. Then I went to New York and I made a life there for myself there. I left Philadelphia because there wasn’t enough money for me to take care of my two children to make, but $8 a week was the top 00:58:00register then. So when I went to New York, I was getting $8 a day.

HARDY: Doing what?

WHITNEY: Laundry… hand laundry. See, I worked in the hand laundry, then after I came from the hand laundry, then I start managing. The boss thought I was good in inspecting work and taking care of the books. So he just turned me over to like being the manager of the laundry. There I had twenty women and four men working under me that I had to see that they... but the boss was, you know, he’d come in when he felt like it but he was all I had to be responsible to. Check in the boss, check out, mark the work in, send it out, see if it was alright when it come back and see that the drivers got their work in the mornings when they went out.

HARDY: So you could go from $8 a week, was that live-in work in Philadelphia?

WHITNEY: No it wasn’t $8 a week, $8 a day.

HARDY: No, in Philadelphia…

WHITNEY: In Philadelphia, I had to, there was nothing else I could do.

HARDY: And that would have been live-in domestic work, and you could get $8... How did you find out that New York, it would be so much better in New York?

WHITNEY: I had visited New York one time with a friend of mine. And I was talking to different ones there about the wages there. She said you could come here and get a waitress job, said, “They pay you a dollar a day but, say you could make seven or eight-dollar tips.” So I went there on that, but after I got there, I found out I didn’t like waiting... waitress work. But I did made good. I think I worked a week. Then I went to the laundry ‘cause I had always liked doing laundry work. And by getting in there, I knew it would be a year-round as long as I wanted it. And I retired from the laundry. So after the boss found out I was good on ironing and inspecting things, he said, “Well I 01:00:00want you to manage the store when I’m not here, you take care of it.” So I did, I’d collect the money and send the boy to the bank with it, pay ‘em off. Then he had a colored pay me. He was a boss like this. He hated to get up in the mornings. He’d say, he used to stay up half the night, I don’t know what he was doing. Maybe playing, what they used to call… bridge or something, there was a great game and he couldn’t get up the next day, so he said nobody else would want it. “I’ll take it.” And sometimes I would be on the job at 6:00 in the morning. He paid very good, ‘cause if I worked over time I got paid extra... I’d get time and a half, so I liked the job and I liked laundry work, and it was something I looked forward for. I enjoyed, I liked public work. I was sick of private work because when you work in a private family, you don’t know when you’re gonna finish.

HARDY: Let me ask you about that… How many years were you in New York, Min?

WHITNEY: I went to New York in 1929 and I left there and come back here, I used to come back maybe once every once, ‘cause I had my daughter here, but when I moved back here the date was 1972. But I knew enough about Philadelphia that I could give you a good background on the early days. ‘Cause see, I came here in WHITNEY: ‘Cause see, I came here in World War I was…

HARDY: You came here in 1919.

WHITNEY: In 1919. See, and that was just finishing up the World’s War.

HARDY: Right.

WHITNEY: They was clo--they had won and they was coming back home.

HARDY: And then you went home for a couple years.

WHITNEY: Mmhmm.

HARDY: And then until '29 you were in Philadelphia.

WHITNEY: That's right. Mmhmm.

HARDY: Okay so, um, when did you return to Philadelphia after you--

WHITNEY: Uh, this time? When I was--

HARDY: After, after you and your husband had broken up.

WHITNEY: Oh I s--turned back I think it was around in, it was around in the, the, around in the, it was in the late twenties.

HARDY: In the late twenties?

WHITNEY: Yeah.

HARDY: Okay so then from nine--when did y--

WHITNEY: Oh, you mean from 1920?

HARDY: I'm trying to figure out what years you were in Philadelphia during the twenties.

WHITNEY: I was, uh, in here up until--I mean we went back home and come back--altogether it was '29 when I left here. We went to New York.

HARDY: Right.

WHITNEY: Between 1919 and '29, at that time I went home and stayed a couple of years and then I came back here.

HARDY: And the rest of the time you were in Philadelphia.

WHITNEY: Yes, uh huh.

HARDY: Uh, do you want to take a break? Before--

WHITNEY: Well how much more longer--

HARDY: Well, uh, actually, gee, you know, your memory is, is so sharp, that we're sort of--this is terrific because we're getting point by point. Um, if you're getting tired maybe I'll come back another time we'll talk about, you know, the domestic work another time or, um, or plug ahead another half an hour or so. Whatever you prefer.

WHITNEY: What time you got? What time you have?

HARDY: It's about ten of eight.

WHITNEY: Oh I think, I think I better call it quits.

HARDY: Gotta go. Okay. Good. Well this is, this is a, a good place to break.

WHITNEY: Mmhmm. Yes. Okay. Ten of eight, boy--

[End of interview.]