[TAPE 1, SIDE A]

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

… having her life complicated by the fact that she was just like everybody else you know, in spite of the fact of all that she was supposed to be and I guess from my earliest memories, a lot of my little disappointments and childish unhappy memories, stemmed from those that I knew I didn't measure up to what my preacher father expected me to be. I remember once we had an awful blow-up—that was after I was in college or ready for college and I did something he didn't like at all. I rode from a picnic across town back into town, from the edge of town back down into the middle of this little highway of this "great white way" in the middle of this little town of about 4,000 maybe…

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

What town?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

It was Johnston, South Carolina, Johnston in Edgefield County. I've always lived in South Carolina, somewhere. It was a picnic of some kind on the school grounds or the church grounds or something—and somebody, a boy I was talking to, had a job at a drugstore downtown and he had to get one particular errand done at a certain time at that drugstore. Most of the day, he was free to stay down there, but he invited me to ride with him in his car back down to the drugstore long enough for him to go do whatever it was that he had to do—it had to do with a prescription or something—a perfectly normal boy—sort of a task, but I went, without anybody's permission, because at that time I still was supposed to get permission to get in a car with anybody. I didn't manage to get down there and wait in the car about five minutes while he attended to his business and then drive back to the schoolhouse without being seen. Somebody found it out and of course it was duly reported to my father and mother. My father was furious, perfectly furious. It took me days and days to

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figure out why he thought it was such a bad thing, not just that I had not asked his permission, which was a pure defiance to him. But there was something terribly wrong about it that I couldn't figure out at all, and later on, days and days and days later, I found out … how, I can't remember, whether I overheard him talking to Mama or whether Mama told me or I got it through somebody else, but it turned out that as he saw it, I had ridden with this "strange" man, someone outside of the family, downtown right straight smack through the red light district. [Laughter] Well, I didn't know that there was such a thing.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

And that raised your curiosity, I'm sure. [Laughter]

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

And Papa was so angry about it because he said, "You can undo in one silly rash act like that what I have been working years to build up." I immediately got furious because I felt he wasn't concerned with what I was doing, he knew that I hadn't done anything wrong, he wasn't worried about me, he was worried about his reputation, that his boys, his sons and everybody else in his family should do just exactly what a preacher's family out to do. And so all my life, growing up, I was hemmed in by those snobbish little standards that small towners, or big towners either have, everybody … not just small towns, you know more about it in small towns because everybody is a neighbor, but it's there anyway, it's just people. They were cruel sometimes, standards that people set for you and I hated it. More and more from then on, I hated the feeling that other people could set my standards and I suppose that I've got more rebellions about making my own rules and defying. James used to tell me if there was a fence anywhere if I saw it, if it was a long distance, I'd go crawl under it or crawl over it just to prove it wasn't there. And I guess that's the way I am. But there were so many restrictions of that kind, always having to do a

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little bit better than others. I myself better, so that it was an easy thing to do and I didn't always do it.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

So, it sounds as if you were just as ornery as James was.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

That may have been.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Did you grow up in the same town? Did you live in the same town?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

No. No, I lived there only a couple of years while I was in college. I had finished high school and I believe that I had a year of college a year or so when I moved there.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Where did you go to college?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, my first year, I went to a college that doesn't exist any longer. Furman University now is the combination of what was two colleges, Furman and the Greenville Woman's College. I believe before it was Greenville Female Institute or something … and when I knew it way back in the twenties, it was Greenville Woman's College. We lived at that time … unknown, where did we live? See, I wasn't with the family because I was in school. Pickens County. Then, for my second year in college, I transferred to Coker, down to this part of the state because my father moved down to Edgefield County to preach. He was a Baptist preacher and that put me a little nearer the family, I didn't have to travel so terribly far to school. It is curious, that mattered an awful lot then. It doesn't at all now, to have to travel across the state. But it was a very different thing then, you went everywhere on the train and travel was expensive at the time and the thinking was that it was very dangerous for a young woman to go alone. Even if she was traveling with forty-nine other classmates, it was still thought dangerous.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Especially if you are so ornery.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Probably so. [Laughter] They always knew that there was some danger of my breaking out at any point. [Laughter]

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

How many children were in your family?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, we had the kind of family that you don't see every day anymore, there were four boys and two girls and since I was the oldest one, I had a lot of responsibility for being a sort of second mother and my poor Mama could have used several seconds. In those days, a preacher made so little money [interruption] and we always had a garden that fed the family and fed them regularly, too. There were always some chickens and a cow, a pig or two or three, which meant a lot of work as well as some advantages. I remember when I was little, we moved up to … I was born down here in Sumter County. As it happens, Mama had been before me from Sumter County and I was born over here at Dalzell, and when I was one whole year old, they moved to the next little town, Lynchburg, still in Sumter County. Then, when I was three, we moved up to Landrum in Spartanburg County, clean across the state, up to the mountain country. And Papa was happy up there because he came from that part of the state and he loved the mountains and he had missed it ever since he had been down here. So, that was his turn. Mama was more at home down here in the flat country. But I remember they told me that for a year there, and this was the third time that it had happened, Papa had preached in three places and that was my third place to live, in each place he lived for one year in some sort of gerry built interim quarters, very uncomfortable, very cramped while he built a parsonage or built a church or something. It happened over and over, and at Landrum, we lived in some style, I guess for part of that

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year, at least, we stayed at a hotel, the hotel. Mama used to tell me that I started wandering from home and going my own way at the tender age of three because I was very much fascinated by a little boy who was just about my age… What was his name? Bob? No …I don't remember what his family's name was at all and I never knew him after we were big enough to be really good friends, rememberable friends. But, I had a little red wagon and Mama said that every morning, the first time that she would take hers eyes off me or look back for a minute, I would be headed down the street with my little red wagon going to see Tom, going to play with Tom. It sounds like I was an extrovert and I don't think I ever have been. I think of myself as being turned in and I don't know whether I am or not.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Oh, I have always thought of you as being really extroverted, in-dwelling and very sensitive and not showing all the time how sensitive you are, because you are so approachable.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

I haven't thought of the term, "in-dwelling." Now, that sort of could put a different light on it. I'll tell you something that James always claimed he had—and he was right—and I smiled at it for years. He said that he was shy, he was terribly shy. He was, but I could much more easily understand that I am than I could understand that he was, because he didn't look shy, and he was such an attractive personality that people reached to him and he always reached back, but whether I was an extrovert or not … I remember a lot of things from that period. We lived there from the time I was three until I got to be nine years old and we came down the state again to Florencetown. I was in the fourth grade. One thing I remember about that stretch up at Landrum was the field day that we used to have. Did you ever hear about field days?

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

No.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, they are kind of like minature county fairs. They are a town fair or a community fair, the kind of thing that they have down at Penn.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

With all kinds of games?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Games, yes. Contests.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Competition?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes. Mama used to always get a prize for her best butter and a certain lady would get the best pound cake and somebody else would get the best blackberry pie, that kind of thing. But Mama always took home the prize for the best butter and I remember that once she got a silver butter knife for a prize and a little dish that you sort of patted it out in, that made pats of butter. One of the things that I used to compete for in the field day at home was a jumproping contest. We always had that for the little girls and boys, the girls really went to town on that one. And they had a greasy pole to climb, they had a greasy pig for the men or boys or whoever to catch. I remember that the little boys could usually outdo the men on that one, they were I suppose unknown more agile, the men were … they could squirm around and I remember jumping rope one time until the contest was won and I kept on jumping because I felt like I was just beginning to fly. I had the feeling that I was sailing through the air. I had such a good time. My father made me stop and said that there wasn't any need to keep on. The idea was to see how many times you could jump before you stopped and I guess that he never had paid enough attention to our playing, he kept up with our work, but he had not noticed enough to realize that I wasn't hurting myself at all. I'm sure that I wasn't really tied at all. I felt so light and free. So, he made me stop and said that there was no point in keeping on because I had won. I had unknown. I'm sure that I didn't understand him a lot of times, because he had a certain

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shyness of his own. When he was well up, I suppose around seventy or more, no, he wasn't that old. Mama died at fifty-five, he was ten years older, so he was only sixty-five then and Mama was living at the time, so it was when he was around sixty, I guess, he began to have some trouble with his left … well, he said his knee, his left knee. When he went to sit down on a chair, he would almost let himself down and then before he quite got to the chair, he would drop the rest of the way, he couldn't control his knee muscles at all. He got worried about it. He finally broke down and went to a doctor, which he didn't do often. You didn't do it in our family for anything short of a fear of death. But he went to have himself checked and the doctor asked him if he had ever been sick as a child. Papa couldn't remember that he had. He never was able to remember being sick, but he did remember that when he was a little boy, he stayed in the house a lot and his mother had been very protective of him. They lived out in the country, on a farm, they all worked hard and she couldn't protect him in a pampering sort of way, they were not affluent enough to do that, but she was very considerate of him and tried to keep him busy with other things so that he wouldn't play with the big boys quite so much. But he had to go with the big boys and he said that he remembered when he could get out and run with the other boys, when she would let him, then he was always the last one in the line. One or two boys who were smaller than he was would run faster than him. He remembered feeling that something was wrong, he was sort of set aside, discriminated against because the other boys were quicker than he was.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Was he an only child?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

No, no. He was one of a big family and he was one of the older members of the family, but when he was little, he was smaller than the playmates around and yet he felt that he was enough, he tagged behind more than was justified by the size. I

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(The doctor believed he may have suffered an undiagnosed case of polio as a child.) often wondered if that was the reason … I've even wondered if he tried to compensate for being physically being quite not up to snuff in his own opinion, by being something like a minister or a leader of some kind who could have his turn at calling the shots, you know. In the community, he would have a power that he couldn't get by outrunning somebody, physically, he could outtalk them.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

What was your father's name?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

He was John Mitchell, John Hampton Mitchell. His middle name sort of dates him, the Wade Hampton days, I guess.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Has your family always been a South Carolina family?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Oh yes, my mother's and his family were always in South Carolina as far back as they bothered to look.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Who was your mother?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

My mother was a Wells from this county and her mother …

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

She was from Sumter County?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes. Her mother was a Charleston family and my father's parents were upcountry Piedmont people who were of a very different background, in his opinion, a lazy southern, shiftless and maybe snobbish lowcountry people. He always had a fairly strong prejudice against the coastal … anything that smacked of an aristocratic background and yet his sisters, I remember, were great DAR people and UDC people. I don't know whether they disgusted him with their prizing so much their background, or whether he just didn't believe it was so, or what. He used to make great fun of that and he never let Mama talk much about her family. He was saracastic about it. I didn't learn a lot of things I wish I knew about Mama's family. Grandma Wells had been a Mellichamp and her family was intermingled

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with the most prominent Charleston names there were in the city. If you wanted to be snobbish, you couldn't get past that. Papa had very little use for that, he didn't like her to talk about it. I started off as a child thinking, "Well, you must not have anything to brag about or you would let Mama tell about her folks." Mama was a very humble sort of person, of course, I think that she overdid it for her own good, but she had great genuine affection for members of her family and since the Civil War, they had all had such a hard time economically, so that she liked to prize what they did have, self-respect, integrity, and an ability to come up again no matter what happened to them and that sort of thing. Papa was very suspicious of anything on that subject our family discussed. He said that people should be more concerned with where they were going and less concerned with where they came from. He dismissed it that way.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Well, that sounds like you had impeccable southern credentials.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

That's a little bit like James' family. His father was, as he said, from the yeoman level of society, from the yeoman farmer background and his mother had a plantation background. His father's practical, hard-headed business sense made him skeptical of his mother's easy-going, aristocratic, be-nice-and-maybe-lose-your-shirt-doing-it kinspeople.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

So, you both grew up with than kind of ambivalence?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes, very similar.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

It sounds like you both responded to it in the same way.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

I suppose that you get that combination when you put that together. I never thought about it once until James began to talk about the ambivalence in his background and then I realized that I had the same thing.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Now, what was James' father's name and his mother's name?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, his father, Eugene Dabbs, was descended from a Dabbs who came from England to Virginia. There were two brothers who came over, I think, one came down through the Carolinas and the other went more to the west. There haven't been a whole lot of Dabbs related to us. North Carolina is full of them, western North Carolina. There are just scores and scores of them, but in South Carolina, there are very few and well, none at present, almost none who are related to us at all. He had a background … we all have, of course, but he found out about his and the family thought that it was rather interesting, and kept up with it, of Revolutionary soldiers, service. James liked to talk about Gregg? Bodie?, Gregg's history of South Carolina, I guess I don't remember which one. Anyhow, the Whigs were the rebels, weren't they? Well … who were the loyalists to the Crown?

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

The Tories.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

The Tories. Well, he said that in writing this history, the historian said that the Whigs would sometimes capture the Tories and kill so many Tories in a battle or an engagement, but when the Tories fought Whigs, they murdered them. [Laughter] The historian's bias comes out, if we don't think about this sometime Anyway, he always identified these stories with himself and his family, stories of the Revolution. Actually, his family was in this area at the time of the Revolution and in the community. That was 'way back, the 1750s, the grant for this particular land was given to Peter Mellette and then the Mellettes sold it to Samuel McBride, I believe, who was James' great-grandfather. So, his family was here as long as there was any community, as early as there was any community here. That took in the Revolution.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

They were the founders of Mayesville?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Among them, yes. Before Mayesville, this was a community.

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People came up from Charleston, they landed at Charleston and came up through Williamsburg and from Williamsburg on up to here and then spread out from here. When you settle a new community, it had to have time to sort of develop and be big enough to found another. You usually started a church in the next little community, or some miles away that became the next community.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

What was the church here? Was this Anglican?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

No, this was always Presbyterian, Scotch Presbyterian. There were not a lot of Presbyterians in the lower part of the state, but …

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Well, McBride, I guess that was a Scotch name.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes, it was, Scotch-Irish, from Williamsburg. Most of these settlers who came in that way were Scotch-Irish and they established Presbyterian churches as they came. At Williamsburg and then about half-way between there and here, a church called Midway, for that reason, and then here.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

At Midway, Georgia?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

No, this was Midway, South Carolina. It is about half-way between Williamsburg and this church and then they came all the way up here. I believe that the Williamsburg people came up here and made this church first and then they put Midway in between. Then they reached out and had another chapel that became a church at Mayesville, ten miles further. That's the way that they planted the next community. I suppose that the Presbyterian strength is due to the fact that there were so many Scotch Presbyterians coming in. They had a lot of immigrants and they pretty well came along up the Black River, settling communities as they came up the river.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Who was James' mother?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

His mother was a McBride, one of those Scotch-Irish families. They came here from Williamsburg and they weren't here for long. Some of them stayed but others moved right on up. Samuel McBride came into this community as a bachelor. It seems that he married the Widow James. When I heard that, I immediately saw the Widow James … I saw Samuel McBride as a man of at least forty, maybe forty-five. It sounded like he would be, especially if he was taken by the Widow James and the widow I saw as a sort of a prune-mouthed little old lady with a bun on the back of her head, maybe very rightous and a tough pioneer type, you know. I found out one day, I think I must have been reading tombstones down at the church, and I discovered that she was seventeen years old. [Laughter] She was already widowed at seventeen. Samuel McBride married her and then she died and he married a second time to Martha Rueberry, who was a Charleston person … now wait a minute. Yes, that's right … I'm getting mixed up on James' own family. That's right. They had only one son, Samuel McBride and Martha had one son, one child, who was James McBride. He built this house when he was eighteen years old.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

In 1859?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

1858 to '60, along there.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

I've always wondered why they named it Rip Raps Plantation?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, actually, we made a mistake when we came back here. James told me better and I sort of pushed the other way and bless his heart, he did what he always did, he let me have my way, but I sort of blew it. The plantation was named Egypt Farm. I wish that we had kept that name. He liked that name and it somehow didn't sound plantationy enough to me and I was sort of carried away with the idea of a plantation, I guess, and I pulled for Rip

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Raps Plantation. Well, they were two different things. The whole acreage, the whole ten thousand acres was Egypt Farms. So named because Samuel McBride was such a farmer, such a successful corn farmer, that trains of wagons came down from North Carolina to buy corn from him —they came down to Egypt Farm to get corn— and the place was called Egypt Farm There is stationery, in James' father's letters, a few scattered things, letterheaded, called "Egypt and Pineland Farms."

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

And was there a farmhouse here before they built this one?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

No. Well, I didn't answer your question about Rip Raps. The whole estate, the whole plantation was Egypt Farms. When James McBride had built the house unknown, which must have been about '61, after he had finished building the house and the war had started, very early in the war, he wanted to be a soldier like all his friends. But, he had tuberculosis. He was not well enough and was very ill. He was not fit to carry arms and they would not take him in the service. So, he got permission to help by going behind the lines and nursing the wounded soldiers. I found among James' papers, my James' papers, his grandson's a pass issued to James Samuel McBride allowing him to get through the lines as a male nurse.

But on the way back from one of those trips, or on the way back from a visit, nobody has ever been able to tell for sure, he and his party at some time camped by a little river up in the mountains of Virginia that was called the Rip Raps River and he lay all night listening to that little river and thought that he would never forget the sound of it. Shortly after he got home, there came a real gully-washing, stump-rooting rain and he lay in his bedroom listening to the water rushing down the pipes and said that it sounded just like that sound of the little Rip Raps River in Virginia and he believed that he would name the house Rip Raps. So, it was the house that was named Rip Raps. When we came here, I made the

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mistake of putting the wrong things together. James had to have some stationery printed and I said, "Why don't you put Rip Raps Plantation on it?" I remember that he said, "Well, it wasn't actually Rip Raps Plantation, the whole plantation wasn't called Rip Raps, it was called Egypt Farms." That sounded like more of the Bible, you know, than what I had grown up with, I guess. It didn't sound as interesting as Rip Raps, which I had never heard before. So, I said that I liked the sound of that better and he said, "Well, all right. It's ours and we can call it what we please." We stuck with that. But I think that it would have been nice to actually call it Egypt Farms. I've got a few more years now and grown up a little. [Laughter] What was it that you started to ask me about?

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Was the original Egypt Farms house here?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Oh, no. The house that was here before Samuel McBride, that young … what was her first name? Anyhow, the Widow James, the daughter of one of the first settlers in this place—that's the name on the tombstone of Brick Church —James Bradley. I suppose that he had bought some land here and given his daughter some or else, the James she married had bought it. They were living here down in the building that is now our big barn in the lot. That high, ramshackle -looking old two-stor barn. It has a very, very crude circular stairway in the corner, a squared off, awful looking thing that is probably not very substantial now if you tried to climb it. But, it was a staircase right in the corner that circled around a little bit, twisted, anyway. That was their house and I understand that even before that, there had been one down in the swamp, on the bluff of the swamp on the river. When they came up the river, they first settled right at the river and then they moved back futher because it was so unhealthy down there. So, they built the second house down there

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on the bluff of the river, after the log house. They built what is now the big barn. After a time, they decided that it should be futher back from the water. They cleared the fields and they moved the house over there. They managed to roll that house, that big old barn, up to where it is now. It was used for a house there for awhile and then it became a barn and then Samuel McBride married the young widow and they built a home in what is now our back yard. You can see the bricks level with the ground showing where the foundation stood. They lived in that for a long time. It was built of hand hewn timbers put together without nails and from the foundation, it was big, spread over quite an area.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

That's just one of the thousands of things around here that makes you feel like you are so in touch with your past. Don't you think?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, I never walk by and see bricks on the ground, I see house foundations, every single time. And I nearly always have least a fleeting thought when I see that of the way the house faced, not straight to the north like this one, I think that it did face straight north, but looked out a little bit to the left of this house. I have found out here in the lines following those bricks that it went all the way out to the present road, almost to the present road to where an Indian trail had gone by and it twisted back again and came into the old Kingstree Road. That was the old avenue out and I found in the woods here and there a crepe myrtle bush or a breath of spring which is usually a domesticated plant that I'm sure were planted by the avenue on the side of the road. There are some right out here on the side of the lawn where, when I cam here, that was woods. We saved that bush because it sort of lined up and I thought it was healthy.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

But those aren't any of the ghosts who live in this house?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

No, I don't think so. [Laughter]

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Who are the ghosts who live in this house? [Laughter]

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, I've always claimed that the grandmother must be here because I've insisted that I've heard one. I can remember that very vividly. I can't swear to it, but I've heard what certainly sounded like a young girl or small person coming down the steps one night. In the middle of the night, I suddenly woke up to a perfectly still world, with not a sound anywhere, because I heard somebody coming down the stairs dressed, or with shoes on. Well, it came very steadily and lightly down to the third step and stopped. It sounded like she lacked a step or two before getting to the floor, but she just stopped and was waiting. Well, I couldn't stand it. It was like leaving the last note of something not struck, you know? The last chord. I had to see it, so I slid over to the edge of my big high bed without waking James and peeked out. It was a brilliant moonlit night and I counted on that light up the hall. We always slept with our door to the hall wide open, because I wanted to hear if Carolyn made a noise in the night or anything.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

But there weren't any children upstairs?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes, Carolyn slept upstairs, she was just six years old. And little baby James was in the basket right by my bed where I could reach out and touch him if he moved. I went to the door and looked out in the hall and I could see everywhere and there was nobody there. The hall was lighted enough with the bright moonlight that was coming through the house with all the doors open and all with the light shining through. There were parts of it lighter than others, but the staircase was perfectly visible and the whole hall was perfectly visible and there wasn't a soul except myself. So, I told James, you know, half-joking but still

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puzzled by the whole thing, that somebody came downstairs in the middle of the night and I never had figured out who it was. He said, "Well, what do you think?" I said, "Well, my guess would be, of course, that it was your grandmother. But then I have seen pictures of her and it couldn't have been her because she was slightly on the heavy side. She wasn't really a heavy person, she wasn't a fat person, but she wasn't slight and this was a very young, a very small person, a light one." He looked at me rather strangely but just smiled and said nothing. Well, he heard me tell that a couple of times and after I had told it about twice, it began to get like a good story and I began to believe the whole thing, especially since that much had actually happened. One time … he never made any comment about it at all until one time a cousin of his was here who had grown up … she was a niece of his grandmother and had known her as "Auntie" and lived here in the house a lot of summers and so on with her and knew her quite well. She was telling me things that she remembered about her one day and she said, "She was the tiniest lady, she wore number one shoes."

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Oh, my word.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

I came back and told James about that and said, "James, you know that I said I heard your grandmother in the house one night but it couldn't have been your grandmother because it was a small woman and your grandmother was a heavy person and Virginia tells me that your grandmother wore a number one shoe. What goes on here?" He just laughed and patted me, to indicate that he didn't want me to take it so seriously and he said, "Yes, she was little, but the picture you remembered was my mother, not my grandmother He knew that picture I had seen at home, it hadn't often been shown. He said that was his mother

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and not his grandmother and that his grandmother was small. He said, "I remember her and she was a little lady." Well, James McBride died when he was about twenty-three and that little grandmother lived on to be an old lady in this house.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

That grandmother was the Widow James?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

No. She …

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

No, that's right. James McBride was the one who came back from the Civil War with tuberculosis and named it Rip Raps.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes. James McBride was my James' grandfather. Yes, that's right. Now, what did I say that was wrong? I jumped the track on one of those, I missed a generation in there.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

You didn't tell us who James McBride married.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Oh, yes. The little grandmother that I've been talking about was James' grandmother. That was Mrs. James McBride, yes. She was from Georgia. She had grown up at Jonesboro, Georgia just south of Atlanta, I think, not very far from Atlanta. I've never been there, but other members of the family have just for fun It seems that … Sophie Warren married James McBride. It seems that Sophie's family, her parents and a big family of children, of which she was the oldest, owned a sizeable plantation there, I don't know how big it was. I don't think that it was as big as this, but it was a big one. When Sherman came through on his march and burned Atlanta and everything else he could find, he had officers, I don't remember who they were, but the home of Sophie Warren's family was confiscated by Sherman's men and used as headquarters for one of the officers. That way, it escaped destruction. So that at the end of the war, when most people were land poor and most people who had large land holdings were loosing them, because they couldn't

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find enough cash to pay taxes on them, Sophie and her father, James McBride's widow by that time, you see he had died during the war, his widow and her two little children got her father to come here. Well, I suppose that he came up actually during the war when they were run out of the house and fled up here as refugees. But she asked him to come when James McBride, her husband, her husband died. Her mother had died, too, along about the same time. I don't know the chronology in there, but she wrote her father that if he would come up here and run the plantation for her, she would bring up the children for him, her brothers and sisters. There were at least half a dozen of them, six or eight of them to be brought up. So, this house was full of young people for a long, long time. She mothered them all and he handled the farm. I was told that … a cousin, Virginia Warren, told me that after the war was over and those people who could were redeeming their land by paying taxes, both of these farms were in danger of being sold lost completely, for taxes and the widow and her father, Grandmother Sophie and her father, …

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

… finally worked it out that he would sell the property in Georgia at Jonesboro to get enough money to pay taxes on this place and they would have one left. So, they did that and they spent their lives here, her whole family lived out their lives or else left from here. This was home from then on. A couple of them went north. They didn't all stay right here, but anyhow, this became the home seat of the Warrens as well as the McBrides

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

So then, which one of her children was James' mother?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes, she had a little boy and girl. The son died, lived to be sixty odd. He finished at the university in Columbia and was invited to come back to teach math, to head the math department. I understand he was quite a musician, he was a brilliant mathematician, but he had that old southern feeling that he had to go home and take care of his mother and the womenfolk and no one was expected to stand up to handling a whole darm, and it was a different proposition too, not as organized as it had been and since the war was over, there were no automatic slaves, I mean automatic servants to do the work as they had in slavery days. It was a whole life choice that he decided to come back here. He never did a lot of things that he might have done and would have enjoyed doing very much, because he was devoted to his family and But he never married and his sister, his sister was a couple years older than he, his sister married Eugene Dabbs, my James' mother Maude, married Eugene Dabbs. Now, Gene came down here to this community from around Cheraw and the Darlington district, it was a district before it was a county. He came down from Darlington district in … oh, when would that have been? It was late enough that Maude was a young lady, I suppose a teenager. He did not come directly to this community. He went first over to Privateer, I guess it was, on the other side of Sumter, in the Richard Furman settlement over there, and got a job as overseer of the Furman plantation. He fell in love with a Furman girl, Susan Furman, Sudy, they called her. Sudy was a nurse and she was a very religious sort of person, rather straitlaced but very attractive, too. Her father didn't think too highly of her being so fond of this young fellow who came from nobody knew where, way up in the

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Darlington district. He was the man of the house by the time that he was seventeen, I think. He had lost his father and so, his mother decided that she would leave the whole place and go off and make a new start. He had come down with his mother and her brother, the mother and an uncle, in a couple of wagonloads of furniture to start all over again. Dr. Furman didn't think too much of him as a son-in-law because he didn't know enough about him. He wasn't sure that he had enough columns on the piazzas in his background and that sort of thing. He discouraged this. Sudy couldn't be sure that there was in his background. But Sudy was sort of frustrated over the whole thing. You didn't talk back to your parents in those days, you learned to unknown, but she decided to go away as a missionary, a medical missionary to Cuba and she went.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Her father let her do that?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Oh, yes. That at least, was respectable, it was doing the work of the Lord. So, she went to Cuba and was gone for some years, I don't know how long. That broke up the romance and when she left, Father left, Eugene left that job, too. He came over here to this community and got a job as overseer of the next plantation to this one, the Witherspoon plantation. But he was still just a very young man, very young, you see, barely twenty. He made a good job of it. They were devoted to him and he was one of the members of the family. That was nothing degrading about at all, about being the manager of a plantation, and he had quite an important job in that period. Anyhow, after he had been here a little while, he began to fall in love with a little girl from this house, Mother Maude. So, he and Maude McBride were married and they set up unknown and later on built their own house. They lived together to have a family of six children and when the youngest, McBride, was two years old, Mother

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Maude died of typhoid. They had just gotten into their new house a short time, because James was eight years older than McBride and he was ten when his mother died.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

McBride was the baby?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes. He remembers that his father and mother decided to build a new house, their own house and they packed up everything and moved to where they were going to live. They set up a camp in the woods, they built a house camp, you know, which is still standing. It was used for years as a double garage later on and it is still standing and sort of a little storehouse out there, we still call it the camp, in the backyard of McBride's house. The house he is living in now is the one that they built. They moved only two miles from where they had been and yet it is so totally … they camped out for about a year before they ever got that house built.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Well, this house was still filled with people.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, some of them. By that time, though, the next generation didn't live here. You see, James' aunts and uncles that were all growing up with his mother and uncle, too. The generations were kind of half spaced. But they all grew up about the same time, so when his mother moved out, his aunts and uncles were moving out, too. The interesting thing was, when Mother Maude died and left the baby of two and then five older children …

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

And James was the oldest?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

James was next to the oldest, Eugene was the oldest. An aunt who had grown up in this house, Aunt Alice, one of the little sisters who came here … there was Aunt Harriet, Aunt Alice, Aunt Louisa and there was another one …Aunt Julia. Louisa got married but the other

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three aunts were living at the summer house here, about two miles away and Aunt Alice went over to stay with James' father and took care of the children after Mother Maude died. She was a teacher, taught him and unknown and she was a housekeeper for her brother-in-law and … wait a minute. No. She was Maude's aunt and James' great-aunt, but they had grown up like sisters and felt like sisters and when Maude died, she came over to take care of Maude's children. She stayed for I don't know how long, a year or something, and then Father married a second time, this time to Mother Sudy, Sudy Furman. She had come back from Cuba and was nursing in the hospital in Sumter and had settled back in her old home. So, he married his other sweetheart and the children's stepmother was Mother Sudy. It is rather an unusual tale about how they circled around and came back again. That circle may have been a straight line.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Yes, Sudy never had gotten married?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

No, no. She hadn't. Apparently she never had had any other …

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Well, was she real religious, she had been a missionary?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes. She was a Baptist. And Father's people were Presbyterian. Out here in this community, there was only one church, the Presbyterian church. Well, Mother Sudy went to church because you went to church, but nobody changed her from being Baptist inside. James had a tale that he liked to tell about his father and the way that Mother Sudy could handle him. He said that Mother Sudy could pin him with one look if she needed to and he obeyed without any question, but he could be a little abrupt with her if he wanted to. He could be a delightful person, but he had a temper like all outdoors. He talked big and threatened big and everybody liked him. Well, something happened among the Baptists, the Baptist denomination, some very responsible officer in the denomination who was very high up in the hierarchy, the treasurer of some

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area had absconded with ?75,000, which was just millions in those days. And all of a sudden the news broke and all of the churches everywhere knew all about it, and I've heard it so often that ?75,000 stuck in my mind from that day until this as the worst figure that you could steal, if you were going to do any steal It happened here at the same time, it was like a volcano erupting, it just blows up and everybody knows that it is evident. Well, I have a memory of people talking about that for a long, long time. I've forgotten the name of the man who did all that dastardly deed and that sort of thing, but I remember what the crime was and how much talk about it there was. James remembered that they learned about it through the newspapers, because they were, after all, Presbyterians and above all that sort of thing. [Laughter] But you didn't say that around Mother Sudy. She was mortified, she had a chip on her shoulder and felt very embarrased and humiliated because she was a Baptist and this thing had happened in the Baptist church and she was in no mood for any levity about it, at all. But they went to church one day shortly after that happened and Eugene, older than James, but still young enough to do these things, I guess, when the collection plate came around, he reached in and took out a nickel. Someone else put one in and he reached in and took it out. His mother saw what he was doing and unknown So, when they got home, all of the family was sitting there around the dinner table and somebody told that Gene had reached in and taken a nickel out of the plate. Well, Father at one end of the table looked down to Mother at the other end and Father said, "Huh, must be a Baptist." It was the first thing that popped into his mind and he had forgotten that he wasn't

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supposed to to mention it. He said it and just laughed and then happened to look up and saw her face and he just froze. James said that she pinned his ears back with one look. [Laughter] He was just about to laugh and he had something in his mouth, he had taken a drink of water or something and he laughed and the water shot out. You could see it all over everything and he was so embarrassed he didn't know what to do. He wanted to laugh but had to stop right there in mid-air, but the water wouldn't stop. But he had to stop his face muscles from laughing. They were making jokes about Baptists taking money out of the collection plates. She was a Baptist all the days of her life, violently Baptist.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Well, did James like her?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Oh, yes. He liked her. He felt that she was a very stern person and to him, she never seemed quite as sensitive and gentle, certainly not as gentle as his mother had been. But he had the greatest respect for her and great fondness for her. She was just a different type of person. And after all, his mother had had children from the beginning and loved them up and this stepmother had started late.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

She brought them up.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

The whole family.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

She had taken them on and it was a different proposition entirely. And she was a little more reserved and a little firmer than his mother.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Well, where did James get his poetic spirit? It sounds like his father was a big blusterous …

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes, he was. He got it from his mother's side of the family and I think that he thought that the McBrides were … well, I don't know

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whether the McBrides were the ones, maybe his Grandmother McBride … the Warren family had come to be today— and a number of them are considered sort of visionary and not practical and that sort of thing, but after all, people said that about James, and there was never a more useful human being. But there was more of the poetic and very sensitive leanings in that part of the family than on the Dabbs side. His father had it to a degree and he had a great deal of most admirable personality that came out in other way s. He was a very colorful person.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

When did James start becoming aware of his concern about race relations?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, he wasn't concerned about that. He grew up, he said, and … he goes through all of that in several of his books, particularly the first one, The Southern Heritage and in I'm Going Home, too. Some of it comes out in there, although he's not discussing that kind of thing. I'm Going Home is a spiritual autobiography and he is much more concerned with what he called the "spiritual oddessy than …

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

… that sort of thing. You asked me when he became aware of that. He didn't actually. When he was growing up, as he said a number of times, there was no race question. He never heard it discussed by people; they assumed that was settled by the war. The Negroes were slaves and then they weren't. That settled it. And, they had their place and we had ours and we were polite to them, they didn't have the advantages we had and they didn't have the things. They didn't have a lot of capabilites that we had, but they were people and you were

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nice to them. You were never rude to them because they could not talk back, they could not defend themselves, they had to be like children not able to talk back to their parents. You had to consider all of that. Manners were very important to him. He was taught that from the beginning. But he assumed that those things were taken care of and he was very much surprised in later years to find that people were still talking about it, talking about it again. The thing wasn't quite settled, you know. But what got him into the thick of things was the matter of manners. He had minded his own business and never … he had so much to do with his literary career, he had his teaching and his courses and that he was not concerned with political matters, and he would have said with sociological matters, anything except what he was doing. Only with studying, scholarly matters,

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

He taught at Coker College?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes and he taught English at Carolina before that. Well, shortly after we came out here, I can't remember the dates, he always remembered them exactly on everything, but anyhow, there was a time when a session of the legislature stayed over time to debate and then vote itself … about all they did that session was to vote itself an increase in salary. Oh, they did that … now wait a minute. No. Maybe I am combining things that weren't supposed to be combined …it seemed to me that that happened at the same session when they did do another thing. They spent the whole time trying to figure out how permanently to disenfranchise the Negroes, keep them completely out of politics and keep them back where they had been in Wade Hampton's day. James watched the papers for several days and then he began to boil and boil because here were these people who were supposed to be, they were the political leaders of the state for better or worse and they were all

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we had and that was the example that they were setting. Right out loud in the house, in the legislature, with all the news media we had there. They were proclaiming to all of the state, including the Negroes, that they did not intend to consider the Negroes first-class citizens or to give them any chance to become that. James said that you had always been unfair to the Negro without admitting it or realizing it but you had never stood up told about it and said so and flaunted it. This, all of a sudden, was terrible manners. He was just scandalized by it. He sat down and wrote a scorching letter to the State saying what he thought about it and then, the lines were drawn.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

To the Columbia State.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes, the Columbia State.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Was that in about 1905?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

No, no. That was after we came from Coker, that was in the forties, I guess, because it was after he came out here.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

O.K., I thought that you said the issue was disfranchisement?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, it was, but they were trying to keep the Negro—to keep Negroes from voting as much as possible and to keep them out of the Democratic convention. They could not have any places of responsibility and they spent the whole time trying to figure how they could keep the Negroes from voting and what kind of roadblocks they could construct. The poll tax had been one. There were lots of things that they wanted bad enough and that they could think up. They spent their time doing that and telling everybody about it, as though the Negroes who were looking or listening to it like everybody else, seeing them do it, were just furniture, you know, not people who had minds of their own or any feelings.

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They were afraid that we had lost ground entirely too much and that Negroes were beginning to want to vote rather seriously in some numbers and they couldn't have that, they wanted to do something about it. Of course, James was so brash that about the next year or so, when election year came up, he was something, I don't know what, a delegate from this precinct into the county. And at the county meeting, in preparation for the state convention, he suggested that we elect some black man to be a representative. Well, I was glad to see him get home in one piece because some of them couldn't take that. And he continued to do what they considered outrageous things.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Well, was this all new behavior?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

He hadn't behaved about it at all up to that point. It is sort of like if you suddenly go out for a new sport or something. You don't start playing in a new way or developing a new technique, you start with whatever it is you have, you just start that way, whatever you are, you express in your way from the beginning and he began to express himself in that field.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Had he always been real outspoken?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes. Yes, but nobody that I know of had ever taken offense at anything he had ever done or said before because he was so gentle and so very courteous, that if you are personally courteous in the field of your personal relationships, there isn't very much for anybody to get mad about. There is not much danger of insulting people. But he talked about things that they were afraid of and he wasn't afraid to talk about them. They would rather that you kept still and wanted him to shut up for goodness sakes, and he wouldn't shut up. He didn't go around trying to convert anybody, he just stood his ground and people

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asked him. If he felt this man was bad he would say something that nobody had ever said before, they would bring up the subject and he would stand his ground regardless. I remember one night that we were over at McBridge's for some particular family get-together and friends of ours were there, a man who had grown up with James, they had been good friends as boys, came in with his wife, Frank Cain and his wife. And Frank had heard or read maybe some letter of James' in the paper, or heard something that he had said. Anyhow, the conversation got right away to race. It seemed to me that through those years it always did and I always cringed and shook because I hated so much the tension and the hostility that you could just feel. And I felt that James deserved it less than anybody I had ever known in the world. Oh, I hated it.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

In the forties?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes. I remember Frank said, "James, you don't know what you are saying. Do you hear yourself? You are plainly said that niggers are just as good as you are." James said, "Well, aren't they? Why wouldn't they be, why shouldn't they be, why couldn't they be? What stops them from being as good as whites?" And Frank tried to talk but he just couldn't get out any words. "Oh, my goodness, oh, my goodness." He grabbed his chest and looked horrible. James said that he was really scared that he had overdone it that time, he thought that the man was going to have a heart attack. He was just totally overcome and in a few minutes, he just left, still almost speechless. He couldn't stand it anymore, he couldn't be around people who felt that way. They said their goodbyes and went home after a very few minutes. Well, that kind of thing happened a lot of times. I would try to avoid confrontations when I could but James would sit there quietly, very calmly. After awhile, I finally began to notice, I learned

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to watch the people in a group when these kind of confrontations were always coming up, and pick out the ones who had certain reactions, but didn't express them, tried not to express them. Everybody was afraid to say anything that didn't sound like everybody else. But I noticed that there were always one or two, sometimes more, who didn't say anything at all and they would be the ones that I would latch on to, with what little hope I had. They were the ones who "saved the ship" or or something. Then after some several years had gone on, not movement but things had developed further, so that everybody was involved, of course there were still some people, but there were more and more people who would at least express themselves if they thought they were in safe company and they wouldn't be swatted right down. They would make some very mild and half-way suggestion, that they were not as prejudiced against Negroes as some people were and that some people that we all knew—they'd go far enough to indicate it very gently, very hesitantly. Things slowly got a little bit better so that eventually people would speak up. Then came the great days and the young people began to speak up. "The crazy, crazy young people. They didn't have any sense, they didn't know what they were talking about they had departed their parents' beliefs and all that kind of thing." They would come up with the most wonderful, honest questions and comments and it was always a joy to me to notice how … I drank it in, I lapped it up …how students loved James. After he had talked at a college, often there would be a private time in some teacher's home, in a student union or a place where the students could get together and a whole room full of students would come in to ask him questions and talk after a lecture. They would sit around on the floor, knee-deep you know and if one or two

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would have to leave to study, they would close ranks and move up. I remember that up at Wofford College for one time. There were just lots and lots of places he spoke, but I remember particularly up at Wofford that Dr. Lewis Jones would ask him up there several times to talk to his history department, and that was the last time that he went up there, in the spring before he died, the spring of '70, Dr. Jones had him come up and talk. Afterwards, he had around to his home a section, a certain number of about twenty of his students to a buffet supper and to sit afterwards and talk with James. He said that during the year he had all his students in bunches, so many at a time and whoever was there came to the house—a very nice evening. After the buffet supper, we went into the living room and all the chairs were filled up and cushions were on the floor and where there were no cushions, there were people on the floor and they all sat around talking to James. Several of them had personal questions to ask him and I remember one boy said, "Why is it that I can ask you all these things, I never talked to you before, you don't know me and yet I can sit down here and ask you things that I wouldn't dream of letting my father know I thought?" That was just balm to my soul, you know. I just loved to sit back and watch other people react to him and appreciate him because I felt that everytime he wasn't appreciated, I felt it so keenly and when something nice happened, I loved him.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Well, those must have been really hard times, the forties, for you.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

They were rough times because I didn't have an outlet. I had no way that I could actively do something except to do the harder things at home that I always did as part of a background to make it a placid place

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that he could unwind in. I suppose that I felt that was my chief function right then, to keep things as peaceful at home as possible. Not gloss over them, but to be able to really relax and to keep him assured constantly of my position that what he was doing was something that had to be done and it was great. I still think that was the biggest thing that could be done right then and I have no regrets at all. What else would I have been doing nearly as important as that? He was the most articulate person that I have ever known and he was the most beautiful human being. I'm prejudiced, but I knew him better than anybody else. If he could express something for both of us, then I could do whatever was possible for both of us to make him free to do it. I know that these Wofford boys asked him that night if they could arrange with the college to have a place available that summer, would he come up there that summer and just be an advisor in resident, just stay in Spartanburg on the campus through the summer or through a couple of months in the fall or sometime like that. He was so complimented, so happy to be asked and said that he would be delighted. I like to remember that in his last spring, he had that invitation and just the sheer joy of knowing that these young, young, people really wanted him.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

That was a real vindication.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes. He used to say that he didn't know why people worried over his not having friends, alienating people and that kind of thing, he couldn't afford to worry about the general public's opinion because the general public never knew that he was there until he began to speak up. They never had been anybody to him. People who criticize him now are not his friends. All of his acquaintances were very silent when he needed them to speak up and still, he never took that as a personal thing at all. He

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said that the friends he did have, any one friend that he did have, was worth all the people who didn't want to try to understand what he was talking about.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Who did he consider to be his friends?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, in his own family, there were only the two sisters who stood up for him and whether they agreed with everything he said or not, although they did go along with most of it. They were very loyal to him and very understanding and would defend his right to see it as he wished.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

And who were they?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Sophie and Elizabeth. Neither one of them had ever married at that time. Elizabeth was married four or five years before her husband died, but that was a little bit later. They were very fond of their big brother and very proud of him. They loved him very much and it didn't matter whether he was a little bit a step ahead all the time of the regular learning. That was alright with them, they were willing to let him go along and listened to everything he had to say and lend him all the support they could, plus their love as well. So, that made up for the fact that a lot of people who had been close to him, even members of his own family, stayed silent of this always, or talked about something else. We just didn't discuss these things with them because it was too unhappy. Too much disagreement on it.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Well, did you feel like you began to be ostracized in the community?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Well, in a way. James never did feel it. I did and I think it was because I would measure ostracism in terms that didn't matter to him. If you got left out of this or that or people tried to

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not to see you in a certain situation. Who were they to him? I would and worried because I felt the children would get some repercussions from it. They were in school then.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Did they?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

They don't feel that they did. They never did feel that they were overlooked and I think certainly that … it is curious, some of their teachers, the old life-long family friends of their father's from Mayesville were concerned about James and concerned about our directing our children in foreign directions, you know.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

James, Jr.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

No, James, Sr.'s contemporaries, if you can call them that. Now teachers of our children, were concerned about how we were training our children. I heard once that someone in the neighborhood said, "Those poor James Dabbs children, I feel so sorry for them." [Laughter] I don't think that they felt sorry for themselves at all. [Laughter] But in school, they got honors that were just amazing. Certainly there were no inhibitions or reservations there. None at all. They never could have gotten away with that. I remember that Dick, Dick was the last one of all and the others did the same kind of thing all the way through. James Jr. was an A student all the way and he was valedictorian, a little class and a little school, but he had been, well, he'd had his share a big share. And Dickie I think was president of his class every year until his senior year and then he got kind of ashamed of himself. They had regular elections then and you worked for it. I never got used to that idea because I thought that it was supposed to be an invitational thing, to get a class office. But anyway, that wasn't the way it was done by the time they came along. Dick decided after three

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three years, or maybe after two years, he wouldn't run the next year for president anymore. He was president three years, and the fourth year, he ran for treasurer, I believe it was, with the motto of "Sixteen years experience handling other people's money." He got it, of course, but by some curious hook or crook, the boy who ran for president and got it was expelled or dropped out of school. Something happened to him, and Dick was given the job. So, he wound up getting that kind of demonstrations of very good feelings toward him. I don't think they ever suffered. They didn't go to parties a lot, but nobody ever did out in the country in those days. They were very, very few and far between and they never seemed to miss that. They had friends and would do things.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Well, did you just kind of remain aloof from the community?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

No, we did all the things, I just avoided party conversations where you would get involved in these things. I preferred to be happy at home with my own family. I suppose that I got to be sort of a loner then because I was more comfortable not being in these social groups where I felt they were being polite and not talking about something else so that I wouldn't have my feelings hurt. That sort of thing. It wasn't ostracized, there was somethig there … of course, there were times, there were instances of people being very antagonistic and extremely rude and cruel, but I wouldn't say that generally speaking, we were ostracized at all.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Were you real active in the church?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Yes. Our church is small and it uses everybody and everybody, no matter how you behave, if you have wild ideas, you are still needed to carry a load. Brick Church—It was back in about '49, I guess, that I first heard about United Churchwomen. I was invited to become a national board member. That is a curious way to start. [Laughter] There were no United Churchwomen

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members in Sumter County except one, I believe. That was just sort of freelance, there was no organization in the state. There had been several attempts, but they had never really gotten something going, in either state or local organization. There were a few scattered women in the state who were very much interested in it and there had been a couple of starts. It happened that the executive director of the national United Church Women was a Sumter woman. She had been living in New York for a long time, but she was a Sumter woman, Dorothy Shaw McLeod, a Presbyterian minister's wife. She was an absolutely charming and very capable woman. I told you that she put the glamour in church work for thousands of church women. [Laughter] I got to know her and she wanted me to get involved in the work and so she asked me if I would consider, if I were nominated for a place on the national board, if I would consider it. So, I talked to James about it and we had decided that I didn't have to belong to anything in Sumter. I don't like clubs, I'm not a joiner. He said that he didn't care, he said that the only thing that he knew of in Sumter that he thought it might be nice for me to belong to up to that time had been the AAUW. Then I found out that the AAUW in Sumter had been infiltrated by one or two persons who were determined to control it from the inside and to keep it from doing anything liberal. So, I thought "To heck with it, life is too short for that." We agreed that I would let it alone. So, I didn't belong to anything in Sumter. I never have identified with Sumter particularly… Then, this opportunity came along and he liked the idea. So, I thought, "Well, if you like it enough and think that it is worthwhile, I'll try it and see." I did go to the national convention, the first time that I had ever left home since I had the children and I thought that I would die before I got back here. They got along all right,

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but I nearly passed out. [Laughter] That was the beginning of about a five-year stretch with the United Church Women. I served as a Board Member and I had to have something to do as a Board Member and I was put on the public relations committee. At that time, we were just starting, even nationally. The whole national committee was just about sixteen members to cover the whole fifty states, you know. We had a radio and a t.v. committee and I worked on both of them and I worked on the Protestant Radio Commission … was that it? There were a million unknown All that kind of thing. I went to workshops down at Emory University, summer sessions in public relations, got particular training in audio-visual, to teach these people to teach with audio-visuals and that sort of thing, and particularly related to religious work, but not just restricted to that. And then there was a marvelous National Communications Institute in New York that lasted for a full week with emphasis on radio for a couple of days, on t.v., on the press, all kinds of things and we met with just the very best instructors and the very best workshop situations that you could possibly get in radio and t.v. And movies. Everyday and every night was filled with some sort of new learning experiences that were really very exciting and most unusual. The press workshops were sponsored by the New York Times. They gave us a tea, I remember, one afternoon for the whole group and I met some exciting people there. Then, various magazine editors were there. I remember in broadcasting, Pauline Frederick. Do you remember her? Her name hasn't been gone so long from the front. She was broadcasting for the United Nations. She was at some of our lunchons and some of the workshops.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

And United Church Women was a new organization.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

It was a new organization and they were training their

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nucleus of public relations people that way. It was a communications workshop.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

And what was the function of the group? What were you all trying to accomplish?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

We were trying to learn how to handle public relations, to spread the idea of cooperation among the denominations in the women's work. The United Church Women is the united effort of the women of many churches. It included thirty-odd different denominations.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

All Protestant?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

All Protestant, yes. They are just beginning, apparently now, to work somewhat with Catholic and Jewish women and they have always had affiliations with them and worked on local projects within specific towns together, but officially and nationwide, they are Protestant. It is a united Protestant effort. That was one of the bigest learning experiences that I ever had. It was terribly hard because by that time, we had our whole family and they were all big enough to need me here all the time and to miss having me here. Miles away, I would worry because Dottie had braids down almost long enough to sit on, just a little girl in the second grade or first grade … no, she must have been in the second grade, I guess, and Dick was not quite school age. I would go away for several days; it was just almost unbearable and I would promise myself that I would never do it again and that I would get out of that thing right then. I would worry about how her braids would get done and I would arrange for some neighbor to do it and that sort of thing. Oh, that was a real sacrifice for me, because I suffered through that. But, it was a great experience and I suppose that I learned enough that maybe it paid off in other ways. I don't know, I hope so. The children lived

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through it real nicely.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

Now, am I correct in understanding that the United Church Women was a liberal organization?

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

Oh, yes. Very. So, that put me as much beyond the pale on my own as James was already. I not only reflected his rascality, but I had some of my own. We were very marked there for awhile. Then, we had "wild" friends, you see. There were the Durrs that I was telling you about. Virginia Durr was Hugo Black's sister, no less. 1 * Actually, Mrs. Durr is Hugo Black's sister-in-law, her sister being Mrs. Hugo Black.

ELIZABETH JACOWAY BURNS:

That's Sheldon Hackney's mother-in-law.

EDITH MITCHELL DABBS:

And her husband was an attorney who was always defending the wrong people. I remember terrible stories that we learned from him that nobody every knew anything about. One in particular, some black man …I don't know whether he tried to rape a woman or what he did wrong, but he was badly beaten and he climbed up those old rickety steps in the courthouse … no, not the courthouse, the building where Cliff Durr had his office and he climbed up those steps too beaten and maimed to walk, to Cliff Durr's office. He never turned away anybody in his life … His life was threatened hundreds of times. Virginia was a very articulate, charismatic sort of person that people just soaked in. She could present any sort of a situation. She wasn't afraid of the devil with his horns screwed on tight, she was just greater than anybody. I remember how they were … we had t