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MIMI CONWAY:

Can we go back a minute? I think you had told me about knowing Ella Fitzgerald when you were young, and her father?

ERNEST SEEMAN:

Yes.

MIMI CONWAY:

Can you tell me a little bit about it?

ERNEST SEEMAN:

Sure. Richard Fitzgerald came down from Boston - from Massachusetts somewhere. He heard about all this big expansion in Durham, and he figured it would be a good place to sell bricks. So he bought a little piece of clay down there and opened a brickyard. He was a very handsome man, a large man, a very capable man. He had several children, and they were all well-educated. Of course, that was before any liberality between the races took 15 William Kenneth Boyd, who also wrote The Story of Durham, City of the New South, Duke Univ. Press, 1927. I was not able to locate these ballads among Dr. Boyds papers. place, and a nigger was a nigger. So he bought this clay near the white cemetery, the land that nobody wanted that you could buy cheap. And I remember the old brickyard well; the old wreck of it stood there long after. And out of that came a lot of Duke's factories; he had other brickyards in other places in the county - one brickyard couldn't supply enough bricks.

MIMI CONWAY:

For the Duke factories?

ERNEST SEEMAN:

Yes. All those big Duke factories came out of these gullies. He used Negro labor.

MIMI CONWAY:

Did Fitzgerald go one time to see Duke about selling him bricks?

ERNEST SEEMAN:

Yes.

MIMI CONWAY:

Could you tell me about that?

ERNEST SEEMAN:

There was a white man, a proud old Southerner named Norton (I knew all his children).

MIMI CONWAY:

Who was Norton? Did he work for the tobacco company?

ERNEST SEEMAN:

Norton was a builder. And this Fitzgerald goes around to Norton's house one morning and knocks on the door. And here comes Norton to the door, all angered at the very idea of a nigger coming to his front door. He said, "Don't you know better than to come to my front door? You go to the back door." "Sorry, Mr. Norton, I don't go to my own back door." So that cost him the contract, a higher price; he lost out.

MIMI CONWAY:

Who lost out?

ERNEST SEEMAN:

Norton.

MIMI CONWAY:

Was Norton the builder for the Duke factories?

ERNEST SEEMAN:

Yes.

MIMI CONWAY:

And when he insulted Mr. Fitzgerald, then . . . How did he lose out? Tell me how Norton lost out? How did Fitzgerald win?

ERNEST SEEMAN:

Well, Fitzgerald was a handsome man and Norton was a shrimp of a man, hot-tempered, southern-based. And he just turned him away and he didn't give him the chance; he had nothing for him.