[TAPE 1, SIDE A]

SUE THRASHER:

Can you tell me something about your family and where they come from, what county in Alabama, how you grew up, where your father and mother came from?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Oh certainly. I'm like most southerners, I'm very interested in family history. Of course, you never are interested until you get old, when you are young, you don't pay any attention to it much. But as you get older, you are always very much interested in it, at least I am, and I think that most people are. But the trouble is, that the old people that could tell you the most about your family are dead by that time, so you have to depend on recollection or what family papers there are or family letters. As far as I know, my father's family were English and the name Foster comes from "forester", you know, the king's forester. Probably they were woodchoppers, but they arrived in this country way back yonder, about 1700 or thereabouts. The story was that one brother settled in Massachusetts and one brother settled in Virginia. They settled around South Boston in Virginia and there are a lot of Fosters still around there and there are a lot of black Fosters. You know, Dr. Luther Foster over here at Tuskegee is named Foster and he came from that area. We can't claim kin, but the fact is that there are a lot of black and white Fosters in that area still. But my great grandfather came south, you see, with Gen. Greene's army in the Revolutionary War and he fought at Cowpens and Kings Mountain under General Greene and then after the war was over, the newly formed United States of America gave General Greene a tremendous lot of land in Georgia to settle his soldiers on, it's called Greene County. As I recollect, Madison is the

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county seat of Greene County. My great grandfather married a girl named Hannah Johnston. They met in a stockade because of the Indian wars. Of course, they were taking the land away from the Indians. They were married and had, I think, thirteen children, twelve sons and one daughter. My grandfather was one of them and they prospered and did very well, because my grandfather was sent to Jefferson Medical School in Philadelphia and became a doctor. Then, he came back to Georgia and about the 1840's he met my grandmother. She was a Heard and her mother was a MacGruder. Now, these are all Scotch names, all Presbyterians. They also met in a stockade, the last flicker of the Indian wars. She was only fifteen when they married, a very young girl. But they married and came over to Alabama and settled in Union Springs. Evidently, they brought some slaves with them. Union Springs at that time was a very rich part of the country. You see, this was the migration from the old worn out lands in the east to the west, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana and finally to Texas. They would come over because they didn't know how to conserve the land and to fertilize it and they would have to get fresh land. The land around Union Springs was enormously rich and there was a great big spring there. There are all kinds of tales about Union Springs, it has quite a history because there was a terrible kind of competition between slave traders selling slaves. At Union Springs, one man poisoned the spring and killed all the slaves that the other trader was selling. Horrible things like that come out of the past that chill your blood. Whatever the glamour of the society was, it was based on this terrible slave system. Anyway, my family established themselves in Union Springs and my grandfather was a doctor and also they acquired a lot of land. Outside of Union Springs, there is a sort of a ridge that they call Chunnunugee Ridge, which is above the lowlands where the slaves worked, and cotton was grown. My family settled on that.

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The high land was unknown considered to be immune to malaria, I don't think that it was, unknown but that was the idea. The plantation owners lived up on the ridge, Chunnunugee Ridge that was supposed to be above the malaria belt. Of course, they really didn't know what caused malaria then. They thought it was the miasma of the swamps, they didn't know it was mosquitos. My grandmother had fifteen children, but a lot of them died. The Foster graveyard unknown down in Union Springs is just full of little bitty graves, "So and So child that died of summer complaint at the age of nine months or two years." So, out of the fifteen children only four lived to be old. Two of the boys were killed in the Civil War. Now my grandfather opposed the Civil War. He was a Whig and by that time he had become quite prosperous and he thought they should settle the slave issue the way that they had in England, by the government buying up the slaves and recompensing the owners. He hated William Loundes Yancey who he thought was a firebrand and was plunging the South into war. So, he was opposed to the Civil War and he found a substitute, he didn't go to the war, which was a great disgrace in those days. I never heard that until I was older. He bought a substitute and sent him to the war because he didn't believe in the war. But two sons died in the war, so I was told.

SUE THRASHER:

Now, how old was your father during the war?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

He was born, I think, either the last year of the war or right after the war. Not only did my grandfather not go to the war, he didn't buy Confederate bonds. You see, in those days, they shipped their cotton through Mobile to Liverpool and the factors in Liverpool were the ones that would make the settlements. So, he told them in Liverpool to keep the money. When the war was over, he was one of the few men in that part of Alabama unknown that had any money, any gold. The Confederate money had gone

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to absolutely nothing. So, he prospered considerably after the Civil War and they lived in great style and he bought up all the lands of these poor fellows that had invested in Confederate bonds. My recollection is that when I first remeber the plantation, they owned about 35,000 acres of land, which was a lot of land.

SUE THRASHER:

Did your grandfather have slaves?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Oh heavens, yes.

SUE THRASHER:

What happened to them?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Well, all I ever heard was that the slaves were so loyal that "old Mose" hid the silver and unknown took the horses into the swamps and unknown all loved him dearly. I was brought up, you see, on the romantic tradition of the slave system being benevolent. And I remember my grandmother. She died when I was about eight, so I remember her very well; I was named for her. My grandfather had died, so I never knew him, but my grandmother, I was named for her, Virginia Heard Foster, and I had kind of reddish hair and she had reddish hair. Very red, in fact. She was the most delightful person. She had married when she was fifteen and she was like a queen bee.

She had always been surrounded by servants or slaves and she had never had to do anything in her life but be charming and everybody loved her dearly and called her "Miss Ginny." Her husband adored her and he would go down to New Orleans and send her back fine dresses. She was really like a child. She had that sort of . . . do you remember Dora in David Copperfield? I'm reading David Copperfield now. She was like Dora, she was childlike. She was full of laughter and everybody loved her and she loved everybody. The person that I remember best was Old Easter. She was a black woman who

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had been a slave. You asked what happened after the Reconstruction, they all said that the slaves never would leave or else they came back and when I was a child, the whole back yard was still full of these slave cabins that were unknown full of old men and old women who had been slaves and still lived on the plantation. You see, they were scared of freedom maybe. I don't imagine they had any money, I suppose they may have gotten a little bit, but they still were there and were fed. I remember sitting in their laps. I think that this was one reason that it was hard for me to swallow the prevailing theory about blacks being so inferior. Because as I recall, certainly in the case of Easter, she ran the plantation . . . she was a little sharp black woman who wore unknown white aprons and dresses and a white starched bandana on her head, she ran the plantation. She wore the keys. You couldn't get a cookie unless you asked Easter. She put the food out for every meal and I'm sure that she even planned the meals. She may have asked my grandmother about some things, but She was in charge of everything and she was always in charge of us children. We did exactly what she told us to do. She had a very great dignity. One thing that I always remember about her was that she never laughed. I think that a sense of humor is very hard on a dictator because she was always dignified and autocratic. She couldn't punish us, I mean by any physical punishment, but she could punish us by saying, "You're not going to get your morning cookie." We used to have cookies in the middle of the morning or lemonade in the middle of the afternoon. But she was absolutely the law and there was no appeal. Neither to your mother or your grandmother or whomever you complained to about Easter. That was just too bad, because they always thought that Easter knew best and she really did. She was a very wise woman and she really was a woman of tremendous achievements, because she

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ran that whole place. I don't know how many people there were on the plantation. unknown They unknown raised their own sheep and cattle and the chickens and the eggs and the milk and the clabber and the butter, everything was raised on the place. There was an enormous orchard and a tremendous big unknown scuppernong arbor. Most everything came off the place except sugar and . . . . well, salt, sugar, I think, and coffee unknown and flour, I suppose.

SUE THRASHER:

Where were you living? Were you living on the plantation?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

No, we would go down there every Christmas and every summer and at Christmas, we would stay about a week, but in the summer, we would stay weeks and weeks at a time. I am just giving you an idea of the plantation. To me, it was absolutely the Garden of Eden, because there was this lavishness, you see. Every meal to me was unknown a delight. I always have liked to eat, unfortunately, and the meals were perfectly delicious and they were so abundant. For breakfast they would have a baked apple, of course, they didn't have many oranges and grapefruit in those days, then they would have oatmeal and then there would be broiled chicken and fried sweet potatoes and steak sometimes and batty cakes and waffles and grits. You never saw such a huge breakfast as there was. And then dinner, they raised their own sheep and you would have lamb or beef or fried chicken. In the winter, there would be unknown great huge platters of birds, quail and oh, they were just drowned in butter and everything was . . . the butter was churned every morning. Ice cream was made, that was a great treat, though, and happened once a week, but the meals had unknown endless vegetables and all kinds of fruit. The fruit was picked just when it was ripe so they would have these delicious figs just bursting with juice and peaches. To me, it was unknown a Garden of Eden and I thought that it was unknown the most perfect place in the

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world and I never saw anything wrong with it at all. And my grandmother, since she had no work to do at all, she would play with us. She would play Flinch with us, that was a card game and she would always cheat. She thought that was a great joke. She would laugh and enjoy it so much when she could cheat and get by with it and thought that was so much fun. The aunts, all they ever did was sit on the front porch and rock and do fancy work. I had one aunt that didn't do anything, she never even did fancy work, she just rocked. She never even talked. She just ate and rocked and slept and had some children. Then my grandmother would take us to town, the little town of Union Springs. unknown I got the idea at that time that she owned the town. She wouldn't even go into the stores, whoever ran the store would come out to the carriage. unknown She had two carriages besides two or three buggies and one carriage was an open carriage, a Victoria and she had unknown matched horses, bays, sort of reddish horses. And there was a coachman with a high silk hat, named Washington. I unknown knew as a little girl that she owned the town. She was the biggest, richest person in town. If you go through all those clippings about when she died, you'll see all the tributes to her. Then, as I said, the people that ran the stores, she never had to get out and come in, they would always come out to the buggy or the carriage and ask her what she wanted and bring out the things. And she would buy us the most beautiful material, real linen and real lace and all of our underwear was made out of real linen and lace, made by Miss Paulk, who lived next door. They had fallen, on evil times, I suppose that they had gone to the war and lost their lands. Anyway, they had a big beautiful house too, but they had lost all their money, so Miss Katie Paulk sewed for my grandmother. Our dresses would be embroidered with a lot of scollops, hand embroidered. Well, I got the idea that this was bliss. Just lavish

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bliss. And I adored it, I was absolutely entranced by it. Granny Foster would go to church and in the winter, she unknown would go in her carriage, which was lined with red satin and she would wear a little bonnet and a little fur cape and when you went to the church with her, Wash would get out and open the door and then she would have her royal progress into the church. You knew that she owned the church. I'm sure that she kept it up mostly. The preacher was named Dr. Bell. I was conscious that Dr. Bell was obligated to my grandmother. So, once again, grandmother owned the church and she owned the town and owned the great big house with white pillars and owned the plantation and she was the queen bee. And that was what I wanted to be when I was little. I wanted to be like my grandmother and have everybody love me and everybody obligated to me. When Christmas came, it was marvelous. They would have a great big tree. In the morning, it would be just the family, you know, with unknown presents and then in the afternoon, she would have in the black children first, and they would get their presents and then she would have in the Sunday School children. I don't think that she had them together, I think that they came at different times, but I do remember that one little black child got a toy piano, a little bitty piano and one of us wanted it and we tried to snatch it away. She wouldn't allow that, she was very fair minded about things like that. In the summertime, in the back yard, they would let us barbeque. I will have to take that up because that is when the great trauma came in my life. But my father, you see, was raised in this atmosphere of unknown wealth and abundance and servants.

SUE THRASHER:

How many brothers and sisters did your father have?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Well, Uncle Hugh and Uncle Robert and Aunt May unknown and Daddy. There were only four when I grew up. The rest of them had either died or

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been killed in the war. My Uncle Hugh lived unknown across the street from my grandmother, and my Uncle Robert unknown lived in St. Louis and Aunt May, who was the aunt that was so fashionable and so unpleasant, too lived in New York. And then my father. You see, Uncle Robert was destined for the bar, so he was a lawyer. My father was destined for the church, so he became a Presbyterian preacher and Uncle Hugh was destined for business, so he went into the bank. And Aunt May was destined to be a great southern belle, which I suppose she was in a way. She married twice, but I'll get to her later, because she was the cause of the downfall of the whole Garden of Eden. You see, my nurse would go down with me from Birmingham and she liked it too. She would bring her little girl down and we would all play in the back yard and it was really just absolute sheer unadulterated joy, as far as I was concerned. I can remember the smell of it now, everything smelled so good. unknown And the sound of cowbells in the morning going to pasture. But anyway, my father was brought up in that atmosphere of the old South. Nothing had changed, these people on the plantation were free, but they were still there and they were paid something, but there was still that old abundance and everybody was welcome for dinner. No matter how many people you had, you could have more. unknown He unknown went off to school and then he went to Southwestern, which was a Presbyterian school. At that time, it was in Tennessee, it's in Memphis now, but it wasn't in Memphis when he went there. It was a Presbyterian school and then he went to Hampton Sydney in Virginia, which was another Presbyterian school. Then he went to the Princeton Theological Seminary. But since his family was so well off, he also went to Edinburgh; in Edinburgh, there is a big Presbyterian seminary. unknown I went to see it when I went to Edinburgh and it looked like a great big sort of dungeon, not a dungeon, but a big fortress on the side of

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hill, very dark and stark, made of dark stones. I found his registration and his history there, the history that he had attended. From there, he went to Germany and studied at Heidelberg and the University of Berlin. That was his undoing, we'll come to that later, but that was where he got the new theology, that not every word in the Bible was literal truth, but that a lot of it was myth.

SUE THRASHER:

About what years were those?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Well, let's see, Daddy was born right at the end of the war and this would have been about in the 80's and 90's. I've unknown pictures of him and all kinds of things that he brought back from the Holy Land. For a long time, we had his theological library, but that got to be too heavy to carry around. Nobody ever wanted it, those old books. They were just so out of date and foolish, it seems. But my father did have an excellent education and he read a great deal. He had a passion for books. He would buy books and loved sets of books, beautiful sets of books. He unknown had a passion for books. He was brought up to do absolutely nothing for himself. He never did one single thing. He always had somebody to wait on him. He would ride up on a horse and all he had to do was just throw the reins and yell, "Jim" or "Joe" and somebody would come and take his horse. Or his clothes were washed and laid out for him and the fires were built and food was prepared. And Daddy just thought that all that just came about by magic. He never did do one single thing in his life. He never washed a dish or cooked a meal or washed his clothes or curried a horse. He unknown could hardly learn to drive an automobile, because he was just so used to somebody doing everything. But that's the way that he was brought up. He was a very honorable man, but he was brought up to think that he was the

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Lord of Creation. Everybody else seemed inferior. He was very kind about it, but black people were just so far down the scale that you just never thought of them except as somebody to wait on you. He thought Easter was a fine woman and he treated them all with great respect, but Daddy was a child of his time. But he was a child of his times not really, because although freedom had come, they had maintained this system as it was before the war. When my grandmother died, the system at the plantation there was just the same as before the slaves were freed. except that they were paid a little something. But Granny Foster still had the same number of servants, she still had them living in the back yard, she still had Easter, who slept at the foot of her bed. And Easter would bathe her every morning, even. She didn't have to bathe herself. And when my father went off, he had a body servant, you see, that went to school with him for awhile. A Negro boy that waited on him when he was on the plantation, but I think that he sent him home from school. unknown But unknown he really had a very fine education. He met my mother in Memphis. He got to be the pastor of the Idlewild Presbyterian Church. Now, coming to my mother's family . . . .

SUE THRASHER:

Did your father come . . . he went to Heidelberg and Edinburgh and came back to Memphis?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Well, he went to Heidleberg and Edinburgh and the University of Berlin and then he took the Grand Tour and went to the Holy Land and all the sacred places. No, he came back and the first church, I think, was in Tennessee at Mt. Pleasant. Then from there, he went to Memphis and became the pastor of the Idlewild Presbyterian Church and that's where he met my mother. Now, do you want me to tell you about my mother? Her unknown mother was Josephine Rice and they lived in the Tennessee Valley at a place

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called Somerville. And I was brought up on the tale about this huge brick house in the Tennessee Valley 1 1 This was the first brick house built in the Tennessee Valley. and the huge plantation and all the luxury and wealth. My great grandfather was named Green Pryor Rice. Green P. Rice. That's his silhoutte there and I have a portrait of him too. He had been a Presbyterian preacher himself, I believe, but he got into the legislature of Alabama and there is a lot about him in Alabama history because he was in the legislature of Alabama and the Senate for a long time and in one of those books, it goes on about his distinguished appearance and great oratorical ability and his brilliant mind. Then, it ends up by saying, "Mr. Rice had all the attributes of a great man and no doubt he would have achieved far more fame than he did except for an unfortunate weakness for the bottle." " [Laughter] That's in the book. I was brought up on this idea that he was a great planter, hundreds of slaves.

SUE THRASHER:

He was originally from Alabama?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

No, I think he came from Kentucky. Turner Rice, he's a cousin and is a nut on the subject of genealogy and he has studied the Rice family until he knows every person in every generation and if there is anybody that really wants to know about the Rice family, they can get it from those papers that he sent me, because he has made a life study of the Rice family. And he had gone back to England and of course, like all of them, they came over here because they couldn't get on in England, they were poor. Everybody wants to carry on like they came from some great noble family, but it is a matter of fact that they all came over because they were poor and they weren't doing so well. If they had done well, they would have stayed. It's like the people in Virginia, you can unknown tell them that your people were from Virginia, but unknown they always look at you like there is something peculiar there, because nobody would have left Virginia if they were doing,

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well, because of course, Virginia is Paradise. Well, we felt the same way in Alabama about the people that went to Texas. I know that I used to tease Lyndon Johnson about going from Alabama to Texas, his family, because we felt like anybody that went to Texas had the sheriff after them. [Laughter] This was always the big joke you know, if you went to Texas, you got out mighty quick. [Laughter] The point is that nobody moves if they are doing well. They all stay where they are if they are doing very well. In any case, my grandmother on my Mother's side was named Josephine Rice and I heard that when she married, the slaves were lined up in two ranks from the house to the gate and her father gave her fifteen slaves when she married. All of which was a total and complete myth because my father and I went up to the TVA for the dedication of a dam, the Wheeler Dam, so it was not far from Somerville and we decided that we would go and see it and this great plantation and great big house [Laughter] and this is the kind of myth, you see, that southerners are brought up on. Everybody has an old plantation and unknown the houses get bigger and bigger. So, we turned aside on to a country road and found Somerville, which is an old decaying village that has a great deal of charm, but it was just moulding in the ground. It was built around a square like old New England towns and you could see that at one time before the Civil War, it must have been a charming little place. We asked about the Rice place and they knew about it, so we went out. And sure enough, there was a brick house and it consisted of two rooms with a dogtrot in between and a loft up above. That was all the brick house there was. It was brick all right. But it had two rooms and a dogtrot in the middle and upstairs was this loft. And then in the back, of course, they had the kitchen. There wasn't any great plantation at all. There was a boy here in Montgomery who was doing his Ph.D. thesis on the effect of slave ownership

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on the votes in the legislature before the war. So, I asked him if he would look up my grandfather whom I had heard had hundreds of slaves. So, he looked him up and found that he had twelve slaves. The unknown great plantation and the great brick mansion and the hundreds of slaves just turned out to be a perfect myth. I think that they were fairly well off and he was in the legislature and he was a public man and they probably lived very comfortably. But my Grandfather Patterson, Josiah Patterson, unknown came down unknown as a poor boy . . . and now, there is a great big genealogy on the Pattersons. They were Scotch people, Presbyterian too, but I don't know how close the relationship is, the names are all the same, Malcolm and other Scotch names. But my grandfather Patterson came down to the Tennessee Valley as a poor boy out of the mountains and was a school teacher.

SUE THRASHER:

Josiah Patterson is your mother's father?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Josiah Patterson was my mother's father. And he met my grandmother, Josephine Rice and they married. She married him when he was just a poor young school teacher. So, this was not supposed to be a great marriage on her part. Her sister, Miss Molly Rice, married one of the Weakleys, which was supposed to be a great catch. He was very rich and had a lot of land, but unfortunately, I was always told, he died in the gutter as a drunkard. I remember that I used to look in the gutters all the time . . . I had heard so often that he died in the gutter and that seemed to be the fate of a great many people, they died in the gutter, a drunkard. So, I was always looking in the gutters thinking that I would find somebody lying there. But poor Aunt Molly had a very hard time. She is part of the story too, about my father and her sons. But in any case, my grandmother married Josiah Patterson and when the war broke out, he went off and he was a captain in the 20th Alabama Cavalry and he fought under Nathan Bedford Forrest

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and I was told he was a dashing cavalryman and a very attractive man. I was always told about how when the war was over, he was caught in Selma at the last battle of the Confederacy. He had promised some young ladies, the Wilkinsons, that he would come back for Sunday dinner. Well, of course, the army was all captured in the Battle of Selma and they were being marched to Montgomery and when the dark came, he fell in a ditch by the wayside that had a lot of water in it and lay there for hours with his nose above the water while the columns marched by, all the captured soldiers. And then he went on back to Selma and the Misses Wilkinsons dried him out and cleaned up his clothes and he was there for Sunday dinner. He died before I was born, too, but the picture I had of him was one of this dashing young man, you know, and he was the one that we always though was such a great Confederate soldier and we were always brought up to think that he was just the grandest thing in the world. He didn't send any substitute for the war. After the Civil War, he moved to Memphis to be near Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was there. And he became a lawyer. You know, Forrest was a slave trader, he wasn't supposed to be an aristocrat at all. I don't know what happened to him after the war, but I know that he had a lot of power in that section of Tennessee I think he started the KKK. So, my grandfather became a lawyer and then he was elected to Congress and he was in Congress a long time, a very conservative man. He unknown is all written up in Vann Woodward's book, The Origins of the New South. He was a gold bug, you see, he was a conservative man and believed in the gold standard and fought William Jennings Bryan. unknown He got beat because Bryan came down to Memphis and spoke against him and nailed him to the cross of gold, as they said. But then he became . . . not only was he a lawyer, but he also became the custodian of Shiloh, you know, the great park, the Confederate Shiloh memorial park.

SUE THRASHER:

That's where I'm from.

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Shiloh, Mississippi?

SUE THRASHER:

No, Savannah, but it's right near there, about ten miles from Shiloh.

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

You mean it is in Tennessee? Well, he became the custodian of that, that was just a sort of a, you know, he was an old Confederate soldier and this was just kind of a sinecure. I don't think that he had to do anything but ride around it a couple of times a year and look it over. But he was honored, you see, by having been a Confederate soldier. I always used to think that it was funny when we were being accused of trying to overthrow the government by violence or force or something, because we were trying to get the vote or get some rights for people, unknown we were constantly being accused of being part of a conspiracy to overthrow the government by force or violence, unknown particularly in the Eastland hearings. I often thought that it was unknown strange that here was my grandfather who spent four years trying to overthrow the government by force, fought in the cavalry and he was honored and got elected to Congress and became a very honored man and he was head of the Shiloh Cemetery. I've often thought how strange it was because those who actually did it became great honored figures whereas us grandchildren were reviled because we were trying to get the vote. Well, the South is a peculiar place. Well, anyway, he did live and was a very honored man and did well in his law practice and he had a son named Malcolm Patterson who also went to Congress and became the governor of Tennessee. That was my mother's brother. Now, my uncle Malcolm Patterson, I used to see him. He was a great orator and he had three wives and he was also accused, fairly or unfairly, of being too fond of the bottle, but in any case he got

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beat by . . . he had a very tragic thing happen to him which ruined his career. He was the governor of Tennessee and was married to his third wife. The first wife committed suicide, the second wife died. He was married to his third wife. I can't remember all the children, but he had a lot of them, but there was a big fight in Nashville and one of his enemies was named Edward Carmack he was the editor of the Nashville Tennesseean, Carmack, and he had a series of very bitter editorials against my uncle who was the governor. Now, what they were about, I still don't know. To this day and hour, I've tried to inquire, but I still don't know what the political situation was that made him so bitter, but he was a very bitter enemy of my uncle. Maybe you can find that out, because I never was able to find it out. So, his third wife told me the following story. She said that they were sitting at breakfast . . . she was much younger than he was and they hadn't been married very long, and she said that the Coopers came by. The Coopers were great supporters of my uncle and they were unknown son and father. They came by and they told my uncle that they were going down and kill Carmack because he had been so vicious in his attacks on my uncle. And so, she said my uncle remonstrated with them and they said that no, they were determined to kill him. And so, they went off and my uncle said to my aunt, "Do you suppose that they could possibly kill Carmack?" She said, "Oh, Malcolm, don't go, you would be involved in it and they might kill you." She said that she threw her arms around him and held him, but he broke away and went down and they had already killed Carmack. He was lying in a pool of blood down there in the center of Nashville. So, the two Coopers were convicted of the murder and were to be hanged, unknown and unknown Uncle Malcolm unknown pardoned them and that absolutely ruined his political life. He was at that time considered to be sort of the rising

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star.

SUE THRASHER:

Do you remember what year that was?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Oh, that was in the early 1900's.

SUE THRASHER:

And your mother was married to your father and living in Birmingham at the time?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Yes. But my uncle ruined his political career completely. I think that he was elected in his later life to a judgeship or given one in Mamphis. But he knew that it would, he told my mother, "Annie, of course, this is going to ruin my political life and I will never be elected to political office again, but I cannot let my friends hang. I know that they did it for me, as unwise as it was and I can't let them hang." Now, whether that was noble or silly depends on your point of view. After that, Uncle Malcolm practiced law in Memphis and then he became a great . . . (you know that he had been accused of drinking so much) and he became a great prohibition advocate. He used to go all over making prohibition speeches and he was a wonderful orator and used to attract thousands of people to the cause of prohibition. I remember him coming to our house and having a meeting in the city auditorium or some theater and speaking on prohibition. That unknown was a great political cause in the South for years, you know, the fight against prohibition. I never knew him well at all, he was a very self-absorbed man. Even my mother never got on too well with him, because she always said that Malcolm was a very self-absorbed man and he was. He was a man that led his own life and his own career. A brilliant man, but a very self-absorbed man. Her unknown sister married a Mr. Edward LeMaster and they did extremely well in the real estate business. But my grandfather died, that's Josiah Patterson, but not until my mother had married my father, you see. All the Pattersons went to the Idlewild

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Presbyterian Church. So, my mother married my father and my sister and brother were born in Memphis. My sister, Josephine, married Hugo Black, and Sterling Foster married a girl from North Carolina name Alma Kalbfleisch.

SUE THRASHER:

This is your sister-in-law?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Yes. In any case, my father moved into Memphis and he became the minister of the Idelwild Presbyterian Chirch. You see, this was the southern Presbyterian Church . . .

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

which had withdrawn from the U.S. Presbyterian Church in the Civil War. Then he came to Birmingham and became the pastor of the South Highland Presbyterian church, which is on the corner of 20th Street and Highland Avenue. And we had a rectory or . . . they didn't call it a rectory but a parsonage on Rose Avenue, which was several blocks from it. And oh, I also look on that life as just sheer unequalled bliss.

SUE THRASHER:

And that's where you were living when you were born?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

No, I was born when we were living in a house nearer the church. There was a parsonage there then off of Highland Avenue and I can remember that mother said when I was born, I was redfaced and hungry all the time. She was nursing me for months and months and she said that if she was fifteen minutes late, I'd scream and the whole neighborhood would be

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upset because I screamed so loud. I always wanted what I wanted and I always wanted something to eat. Evidently, I was a very lusty, redfaced, loudmouthed child. But I was a terrible disappointment because I wasn't a son. You see, they had picked out a name. They had named my brother for Daddy's father, Sterling Johnson Foster and they were going to name another boy for her father, Josiah Patterson Foster. So, I came along you see, and I was a disappointment because I was a girl. So, I used to spend hours trying to kiss my elbow because they told me that if I kissed my elbow, I'd turn into a boy. And I suppose that I spent hours of my life trying to kiss my elbow, which of course, you can't do. Did you ever try it? You never heard that, that if you kissed your elbow, you would turn into a boy? Well, they told me and I believed most anything that I heard. [Laughter] Daddy used to say that if I broke my arm, I could kiss my elbow and I never was able to do it. [Laughter] But I was brought up with this feeling that I had disappointed my father by not being a boy. But my mother championed me, so my mother was my champion in the family and my father was the one that I always felt hadn't been so delighted when I came along. And my sister was his great favorite anyway. I was more like him. He talked a lot and I talked a lot and he had a lot of curiousity and I had a lot of curiousity and he lost his temper, I lost my temper. And I defied him, you know. And then, I was scared of him in a way, because he would spank us with folded newspapers, which didn't hurt a bit, unknown but it frightened us because it was so noisy and he was so noisy. He had a very powerful personality. Then, he used to give us "Pluto Water." He had a feeling that he could cure anything with "Pluto

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Water" and castor oil. Have you ever tasted "Pluto Water?"

SUE THRASHER:

No, I don't even know what it is.

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Well, you know what castor oil is, well, "Pluto Water" came from some springs (French Lick Springs) up in Indiana and it had a red devil on the outside of the bottle, so when we got sick, whatever we had, he would put us in the tub and give us orange juice laced with castor oil, the most horrible combination I could think of. Then, to get rid of the castor oil, we would have to drink a big glass of "Pluto Water." Well, we would usually throw it up, that's why he did it in the tub, you see. But he would keep on doing it until we finally got it down. Of course, the next day we were purged of everything in us. Well, maybe it did cure us, anyway, we were all fairly healthy. But it was a drastic means, I must say.

We unknown would go to Sunday School on Sunday and church and being the preacher's family, we had to go to Sunday School and church and then in the afternoon, we had to go to Christian Endeavor or whatever the young people's thing was and then we had to go to night service. Four times on Sunday. On Wednesday, we had to go to prayer meeting. And of course, Mother had to go to ladies meetings, too and of course, Daddy had meetings with the session. So, the church absorbed our life. Then, we would have prayers in the morning. We would come down and have morning prayer before breakfast. At that time, we had two servants, my nurse, who was named Alice, we called her Nursey, and then a cook who was a wonderful cook, and her name was Sally.

SUE THRASHER:

Were both of the servants black?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Oh yes. And oh, Sally used to cook wonderful breakfasts too, like grits and gravy and broiled chicken and sweet potatoes. She never would

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come to the prayer service because she was cooking breakfast and so, we would have to have about a half hour, kneel down and pray and Daddy would pray and read the Bible and this was part of being a preacher's child. Of course, we were always in agony with impatience to get to the table and eat breakfast. We always thought that breakfast was the reward for the prayer effort, this was what God blessed you with.

SUE THRASHER:

Now, how much older were Sterling and Josephine than you?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Well, my sister was about four years older and he was about five or six years older.

SUE THRASHER:

Sterling was the oldest?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

He was the oldest and he was a very handsome boy. He adored my mother, absolutely worshipped her. He was kind of scared of Daddy, too. Daddy expected him to be very brilliant and he wasn't. My poor brother was always being fussed at and held in shame because he wasn't brilliant in school. Daddy lavished most of his devotion on . . . I'm sure that he was fond of us, but the love of his life was my sister, Josephine. He absolutely adored unknown her. unknown I never saw such a worship in my life. She could do no wrong and he excused her from everything and she was an unusally sweet, beautiful child and everyone adored her. She was delicate sort of and I was supposed to be the bad child and she was the good child and I was the ugly child and she was the pretty child and I was the mean child and had a high temper and she was the sweet child. Now, I know that this is just all exaggeration, because I was loved by my mother and I remember that I was told by her that I was a sweet, beautiful child; I could be if I wanted to and didn't lose my temper. [Laughter] Which I did. I had a nurse and she was devoted to me. So, really, my early life

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was joyful. You know, I never went to bed . . . it shows how spoiled I was, but I never went that either my mother or my nurse didn't lie by me and pat me to sleep. I was a terribly privileged child and I was brought up in a little cocoon of love and devotion and care and I was always surrounded by somebody looking after me. I was just adored by my mother and my nurse, anyway. unknown I even liked going to church. Mother would let me go to sleep and put my head in her lap and I loved Sunday School, I thought that was lots of fun. We'd sing, "Bright unknown the Corner Where You Are" and get little presents and pictures of Jesus.

SUE THRASHER:

Was this church a status church?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Yes. It was one of the leading churches and it was very fundamentalist. Now, the first great trauma of my life, and that must have happened when I was about six or seven, I suppose. I think that it was my seventh birthday and we were down in Union Springs and everything was glorious and happy and I told you about my sister being called, "Miss Sis" . . . . did I get that on tape?

SUE THRASHER:

No.

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Well, as for that, . . . . I was all of seven, so she must have been ten or eleven and unknown Aunt May from New York was down there and she had her daughter. Aunt May had married a great friend of my father's from Memphis, named Mr. Johnston and she had divorced him, which was almost unheard of in those days. And Aunt May was there with her daughter, she had divorced Mr. Johnston and had married another man who was an Irishman . . . what was his name? It'll come to me.

SUE THRASHER:

She lived in New York?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

She lived in New York and she was very fashionable. She dressed in great style, you know, and spent a lot of money and went abroad a lot. Her daughter Elizabeth, married very rich men. The last

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one was Count von Furstenberg, who was a German count. And they had a daughter named Betsy von Furstenberg who is an actress now in New York. She was and still is quite a well known actress. Aunt May was determined to live the . . . she would be a jet setter now. It was all kept up, of course, by the money from the plantation.

SUE THRASHER:

Not by her husband's money?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

No. She married a rather poor man and the family looked down on him because he was Catholic and Irish and didn't have any money. I think that he had a lot of charm, but he didn't know how to hunt or shoot and he was always sort of looked down on as though Aunt May had made a very serious mistake, which I'm sure must have irritated her very much, because her brothers were not very kind about Mr . . . . what was his name? Leary, Mr. Leary, an Irish name. Well, poor Mr. Leary had a pretty hard time, too, because he came down at Christmas time and all the men went hunting, you know, and he was left behind or else he was taken out and made fun of because he couldn't shoot. He didn't know anything about horses and was a city boy and they all thought that he had married Aunt May for her money and that she was always getting more than her share out of grandmother and there was always friction there. I was conscious of it. Anyway, she came this Summer and she heard the little black children in the back yard calling my sister, "Sis." And my brother called her, "Sis," and I called her, "Sister." Now, although she was the angel of the family and I was supposed to be the devil, I adored her. The fact that I was not supposed to be up to her didn't keep me from loving her. She was unknown just such a sweet spirited person. I really adored her. She was one of the loves of my life. This episode was so typical of her, because Aunt May sent Easter out to tell the little

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black children that they couldn't call her, "Sis." They had to call her "Miss Josephine." So, that was sort of a warning of thing you know. Our idyllic days were over. So, when they were told this, they were all sort of astonished and hurt and we were all kind of hurt and didn't know what it was about. Here, Sister who had been playing with them all of her life had to be called "Miss Josephine" all of a sudden.' So, Sister said to them, "Now, you don't have to call me ‘Miss Josephine,’ you just call me ‘Miss Sis.' " So, everybody after that called her Miss Sis and that got to be her nickname. The white children and the black children all called her "Miss Sis." She solved the issue by not hurting anybody's feelings. She spent her life doing that. But in any case, the great trauma was that when my birthday came along, I had always had my birthday celebrations in Union Springs because it was in August and we were usually down there in August. This time, I was seven years old and I was going to school the next fall. I always had my birthday in the back yard with the black children and we would have barbeque and they would let us barbeque over a little pit that they would dig for us. So, this time, my mother and grandmother and aunts and all said that I had to have it in the front yard and with just the white children, no black children could come to the party. Well, I got very angry about that and the main thing was that I wanted the barbeque. [Laughter] You see, they would dig a pit in the back yard, which was sandy, and then the cook would give us chickens and we would build a grill over the hole and build a fire and then we were allowed to baste the chickens and turn them over and of course, by the time that we got through, they were full of sand, but to me, (this had been my usual birthday party) and to me, this was a great event. Here I was presiding over the chickens, you know. Well, anyway, I had a tantrum at breakfast and made strong protest about

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the party in the afternoon and no barbeque. So, they agreed that I could have the barbeque in the morning and the party in the afternoon. This was the compromise that they reached.

SUE THRASHER:

The barbeque was in the backyard?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

With the black children and the party would be in the front yard with the white children. Well, Elizabeth, Aunt May's daughter was there and Aunt May would bring a French maid with her when she came, if you can imagine. You can imagine how happy the French maid was. [Laughter] Aunt May, as you could say, really put on airs. Anyway, Elizabeth was always dressed up in these beautiful dresses with sashes and everything matching and her hair curled . . . .

SUE THRASHER:

Was Elizabeth your age or about your age?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

She was a little older than I was, about my sister's age. So, we had the barbeque and everything was going on fine and we were dividing up the chicken and one of the little black girls was tearing up the chicken and she offered a piece to Elizabeth and Elizabeth, who must have felt like an outcast in this group anyway, she all of a sudden said, "Don't you give me any chicken out of that black hand of yours. I'm not going to eat any chicken that your black hand has touched, you little nigger."

SUE THRASHER:

So, how did you respond when your cousin said that?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Well, you see, the little girl that did it was my nurse's little girl. You see, I was brought up with her. My nurse had a little girl just about my age and I was brought up with her, she and I played together all the time. Now, Nursey didn't live on the place. She had a husband or a beau who would come and get her every night. I forget his name, we just called him Nursey's beau or whatever. He was a tall yellow man and he would come every night and take her home. My mother resented this because she wanted her to stay on the place. So that she would get up

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with us in the night, I reckon. But anyway, mother liked the servants to live on the place and Nursey refused to live on the place, she went home every night with this tall yellow man. Sarah wasn't his daughter, she was the daughter of the first husband. Sarah and I were just raised together there in the kitchen and played together and I was very fond of her. So, it was Sarah that offered Elizabeth a piece of chicken and she said, "I'm not going to take anything from your black hand, you little nigger." Well, I got furious with her and threw the chicken at her and also tried to throw a knife at her, which got me to bed very promptly, because she said that I had tried to kill her or something. And I was furious. They put me to bed for being so bad. I called her a damn fool, too. Now, how I heard that, I don't know. [Laughter] But you know, the curious thing is and this is a true story that you won't hardly believe, but this is an absolutely true story. Years and years later, I was in Washington working against the poll tax and I was working with a Mrs. Spraggs, who was a black woman, a very light woman, from Birmingham, Alabama, who wrote for the Chicago Defender. So, she and I got to be very friendly, we would kid each other about being from Birmingham, you know. And I would always call her Mrs. Spraggs and she would call me Mrs. Durr. We were being formal, but we were being . . . if I had called her Venice and she called me Virginia, that would have been fine, but she couldn't call me Mrs. Durr and I call her Venice, you see, and she never would call me Virginia. We were working toward a new relationship, if you know what I mean. So, she called me Mrs. Durr and I called her Mrs. Spraggs. She was a very handsome woman, very smart indeed. She worked in the NYA with Aubrey Williams and then she had come to Washington and was a correspondent for the Chicago Defender, which was a big Negro newspaper. One of the

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largest in the country and she was supporting the anti-poll tax fight and we were quite friendly. So, she came up to me one day and said, "Mrs. Durr, my mother-in-law is visiting me from Birmingham. She wants to see you." I said, "Who is that?" She said, "Her name is Mrs. Spraggs." I didn't know who in the world it could be, I had never heard of a Mrs. Spraggs. She said, "She knows you." I said, "I'm sorry, but I don't have the least recollection in my entire life of knowing anybody named Mrs. Spraggs." So, about a year later, she came up to me again and said, "Now, Mrs. Durr, my mother-in-law is visiting with me and she wants to see you. Her name is Mrs. Spraggs." And I said, "Mrs. Spraggs? I would like to see her. Bring her down to the office, but I have no recollection of Mrs. Spraggs at all." Well, the third year, she came to me and said, "Mrs. Durr, my sister-in-law would like to see you, she's visiting me and she knew you as a little girl." I said, "What is her name, and at that point, she said, "Sarah Spraggs." Well, you see, I had never known Nursey by her name at all.

SUE THRASHER:

So, the mother-in-law was . . . .

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Was my old nurse and I had never known her name. Here she was, the love of my life and she raised me from a baby for all those seven years and I adored her, but I never knew her name. She was either Nursey or Alice. You see, her daughter-in-law would not call her by her old name, she kept telling me that she was "Mrs. Spraggs," and I didn't know who Mrs. Spraggs was. I had never heard of Nursey being called Mrs. Spraggs. It just shows you just how completely backwards I was. But she did say, "Sarah Spraggs." So, I immediately recognized Sarah. Well, Sarah came and she was a handsome woman then and we were both then in our thirties and I said to Venice Spraggs, "Bring her down to the

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office and we'll have lunch together." Well, the problem then was where in the name of God to have lunch with two black women. At that time, the only place that you could have lunch in Washington was at the YWCA, that was the only place that you could go that was integrated, black and white together. But there was a Chinese restaurant right near the office. So, I called up this Chinese restaurant and asked them if they would take us . . . . well, anyway we went there and they did take us and put us in a sort of a little private room. So, it was Sarah and we had a wonderful time talking about our childhood and our early life and Nursey by that time had died, you see. So, I missed seeing her because I didn't know her name. But the thing that Sarah remembered about me was when I threw the knife at my cousin because she called her a little nigger and wouldn't eat the chicken out of her hand. She had remembered that all her life, and I unknown remembered it too. And that was the thing that she remembered most about me. We tried to stay in touch with each other, but then I think unknown she finally went to Chicago and finally faded out. I can't find her. I think that she got to be a school teacher. This is the difficulty, here I was, just as intimate with Sarah and Nursey and the tall yellow man, it was as though they were members of my family, and yet, I literally never knew what their name was. But anyway, going back to the barbeque, I was acting badly. So, when I came down to dinner, one o'clock dinner, you see, there was always dinner in the middle of the day. Oh, my Aunt May and all of them were out to get me in trouble, "Oh, Annie, You've got the wors child. She said, ‘Goddamn.’ " I was the real villain and of course, I began to cry because I felt that everybody was against me, so I went out on the backporch and sat in Nursey's lap and she hugged me and kissed me and comforted me. Then, the party came on, this was the white party. They

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had a summerhouse on the front lawn. I had had typhoid fever the year before, very severe typhoid fever and they starved you in those days, they literally gave you nothing to eat. They gave you ice baths to keep your fever down and all that you could eat was water and white of egg or something beaten up in it. They gave you absolutely no food at all and I was just in a state of starvation. I don't know how many pounds I lost. I was so weak when it was over that I couldn't walk, I learned how to walk all over again. That's how I got curly hair, though, that's one thing that happened, my hair got curly from the high fever or something. That really is true, I never had very curly hair when I was younger and after I had typhoid fever, I got very curly hair. Have you ever heard of that before? I never heard of it either, but that's what my mother always said happened. But in any case, all during my convelesence, I would be planning my birthday party. I was going to have a pink dress, a pink sash . . . I loved pink, and pink slippers and pink socks and a pink birthday cake and pink ice cream. Well, I did. I had a pair of pink kid slippers and pair of pink socks and a pink organdy dress and all embroidered and ruffled and laced and I had a pink sash and a pink bow in my hair and I had a pink cake and pink ice cream. And you would have thought that I would have been the happiest thing in the world, I had everything just as I wanted, presents and all. But the other little white children, they were just gathered from the town, you know, little girls and boys that I should know, but I didn't and none of the little black children could come, and I was in disgrace from calling my cousin a damn fool and throwing a knife at her. So, all of a sudden, I had a tantrum. I lay down on the ground and yelled and screamed and kicked and was put to bed again. The party went on without me. I was again in

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disgrace and so, when I went down to the table that night for supper, my mother by this time was quite worried about me because this was the second time that I had been put to bed on my birthday. And the whole family thought that I was just the most vicious child in the whole world. I had said, "Goddamn," and thrown a knife at my cousin. I don't think that they thought about my taking up for Sarah, it was my action toward my cousin. Well, bless God if they didn't all start after me again at the dinner table. "Annie, you've got the worst child that I've ever known, you've got to do something about her." Well, I got mad again and threw a glass of water at my cousin or my aunt, I don't know which. I had another tantrum and I was banished. I went on the back porch again, crying and sat in Nursey's lap and I could hear, it was right outside the dining room door and I heard my aunt say, "Annie, you've got to do something about that child." This was my Aunt May, the fashionable New Yorker, "She is the worst child that I have ever known in my life." She said, "Now, I do think that you have got to do something about that nurse of hers that spoils her so badly. She kisses and hugs that woman all the time. And you know, all those black women have disease and you don't know what she'll catch." Here I was sitting in Nursey's lap and of course, Nursey heard all of this. My mother didn't take up for Nursey but she took up for me.

She did try to take up for her daughter, but she didn't try to take up for her nurse and neither did my grandmother. You see, the nurse had been coming down there for seven years of my life and spending almost every summer and they knew her and they knew what a good woman she was and knew how kind she had been to us and what a faithful servant she was and yet, they did not defend her from this charge of being . . . of course, it was venereal disease that they were talking about. So, Nursey put me to bed that night and lay down by me until I went to sleep and the next morning,

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she was gone. She had taken her daughter and left and she never came back.

SUE THRASHER:

She left on her own?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

She left on her own. She had been insulted and she left. She just up and left. And oh, the shock, to wake up in the morning and find Nursey gone! And Sarah gone. Everybody wondered what in the world had happened. Nobody could imagine why she had gone and I thought I knew, but of course, nobody was paying any attention to me. Maybe Mother had some suspicion of it, I don't know. Well, this was the first really great trauma of my life, because I lost this woman whom I had loved and who had looked after me for seven years. So, when we got back to Birmingham, she had gotten a job in the neighborhood with one of the neighbors and I used to go over and sit in the kitchen and just beg her to come back. Of course, she wouldn't do it. And Mother begged her to come back but she wouldn't do it. And that winter or spring, my grandmother died and I remember that I ran up to tell her that my grandmother had died and somehow I thought that if my grandmother had died, maybe she would come back to us. I associated the whole plantation with my grandmother. But she never came, wouldn't come. The strange thing was, she never lost her fondness for me. She would call occasionally and come to see us occasionally and as I said, years and years later in Washington, she remembered me. That's a curious story isn't it? It is absolutely a true story. But as you can see, between Nursey and Easter, I had a mighty hard time believing in the natural inferiority of the black race. Also, you see, I got accustomed to being looked after by blacks. They were my refuge in times of trouble and that was really the basis of my relationship with Mrs. Bethune, because Mrs. Bethune became translated into the black woman who looked after me and became my protector. But in any case, that was the first great trauma of my life and

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it was a trauma and it really did upset me terribly and it upset my mother. Then, the next thing that happened was that my father was thrown out of the church.

SUE THRASHER:

And how old were you when that happened?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Well, I must have been seven or eight, maybe eight years old. It was shortly after this first trauma. The way that happened was, as I said, he had been to Germany and studied at Berlin and Heidelberg and he had gotten the new theology, which was that the Bible was not literally true, that every word was not dictated by God, but that a lot of it was symbolic. Now, the leading members of the church were my mother's two first cousins, Sam Weakley and John Weakley, who were Aunt Molly's sons. Aunt Molly was my grandmother's sister, she married the rich Mr. Weakley who died, they said, in the gutter from drink. My Grandfather Patterson had taken these two unknown and brought them over to Memphis and they lived in the house with my mother and they went into his office and they both became lawyers and very good lawyers. My mother felt more like they were brothers than first cousins because they had been raised in the house with her. Sam and John Weakley were very devoted and they came back over to Birmingham and Cousin Sam became quite well off as a lawyer and so did Cousin John. They made a lot of money and I think that Cousin Sam was on the Supreme Court for awhile, but maybe just as an appointed judge. He was a great prohibitionist. His father had been a drunkard and he was a great supporter of Uncle Malcolm Patterson, when he became a great prohibitionist. It made everybody most uncomfortable, even over a glass of wine. Wine couldn't be served at the church, you see, you had to have grape juice. I don't think that Uncle John was as conservative as Cousin Sam was, but they were both strict fundamentalist Presbyterians. Then, there

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was Mr. Barron who was head of one of the steel companies. He had a great big beard and looked like Jehovah.

SUE THRASHER:

So, the church was full of fine, upstanding citizens?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Fine, upstanding citizens.

SUE THRASHER:

Monied citizens.

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Monied citizens and although some of them were working convicts in the mines but they were considered the leading citizens of Birmingham. Of course, you know that in a southern town, the Episcopal church is the most fashionable, the Presbyterian church is next and then come the Methodists and then the Baptists and after that you know . . . of course, the Catholics at that time were hardly considered, there were so few of them . . . but after that would come the evangelical groups, you know. But there was always that rank so that being a Presbyterian, I knew that the Episcopalians . . . it was the same thing as Jacob's Ladder, there was always somebody above you and somebody beneath you. [Laughter] So, the Presbyterian church was highly thought of, but I knew that St. Mary's, the Episcopal church which was not far from us, was the most fashionable church. That was just something that I learned by osmosis. Nobody told me, I just knew it. Anyway, the church people began to suspect that my father was heretical and particularly Cousin John and Cousin Sam. So, he was called up several times and they noticed things that showed that he didn't believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible. So, finally, it got to a decisive point and they called him in and asked if he knew these were heretical sermons that he was giving, in which he did not seem to think that every word of the Bible was literally true. So, he was faced with the problem that he had to declare on oath before the session that he believed that the whale swallowed Jonah and Jonah stayed in the whale's belly for three days and was spewed up alive. And he had

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to swear to that as the literal truth, God given. Well, they gave him a week to make up his mind and they told him that if he didn't make up his mind, he would be denounced as a heretic. Of course, this was done by my mother's two cousins. And Cousin Sam lived right above us in a great big red house, I was devoted to his daughter and to Cousin Sam, they were part of the family, you know. This created quite a terrible breach in the family and Daddy just walked up and down that whole week, I can hear him now, just walking up and down in his study. He had a study upstairs and we were all just terrified, Sister and Brother and I and Mother was crying and the servants were upset. Sally was still there, but of course, Nursey had gone and I forget who else was there. And Mother was always trying to take in Daddy some coffee or buttermilk, to try to get him to eat something and he was up all night. And he would say, "Oh, God. Oh, God." And it wasn't blasphemy, he was really praying. Well anyway, at the end of the week, he went back and told them that he didn't believe it and he was dismissed from the church as a heretic and brought up before . . . let's see, they have a presbytery in each district and then a synod. I believe that he was brought up before the presbytery and the synod as a heretic. Anyway, he never did get another church.

SUE THRASHER:

Do you remember how old you were then? You were about seven or eight?

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Yeah, I was about seven or eight. I was just starting school, I remember and you see, I had had these two traumas all within the same year or the same few months, it seems to me. Of course, I didn't understand what all the theology was about and Daddy had a nervous breakdown. He just couldn't sleep or eat or anything. He was a very high strung man and he went off to French Lick Springs and at French Lick Springs, this is where

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"Pluto Water" came from. This was a great watering place, where you drank "Pluto Water", they bottled it. So, Daddy went off to French Lick Springs to drink "Pluto Water" and Mother was left there with us three children, you see. And I don't know what we lived on, I suppose that my grandmother helped us out. She was prosperous at the time, she hadn't died yet, I know. But I remember going up to Uncle Sam's for Sunday dinner and Mother crying and having an argument with Uncle Sam and she cried and oh, how distressed I was! About that time, I got the idea that the Devil . . . I had been hearing about the Devil, you see. At that time, Hell wasn't something remote, it was right down there underneath unknown you and you burned eternally and the Devil took you and turned you over on the hot coals and let you fry and sizzle. So, I did something that I knew was wrong, maybe I stole a piece of pie out of the icebox or something. I always had a passion for food and for lemon pie. [Laughter] I remember being terrified that the Devil was going to get me and fry me forever, you know, and I was sitting on the stairs crying. Well, this must have been before Daddy got thrown out of the church, it was just about this time, I know. Mother sat by me and put her arm around me and said, "What in the world is the matter?" I was almost hysterical and I said that the Devil was going to send me to hell and fry me forever because I had stolen the pie. She said, "Oh, don't believe a word of that. I don't care what you hear in Sunday School or church, just don't believe a word of that. It is the silliest thing in the wide world. Just don't believe a word of it, there's not a word of truth in it. God is your father and you know that your father does spank you sometimes with a folded newspaper, but that is as much as God would ever do. You know that your father is a very good kind man, so God is a good kind man. Just don't believe it." I said, "But Mother, I hear it every Sunday." She said,

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"Well, just don't believe it. I'm telling you that there is not a word of truth in it." Well, Mother just banished the Devil and Hell right out of my life right then and there. [Laughter] She got rid of them. I might have been a better woman if it . . . [Laughter] It was my permissive raising. Anyway, we moved to Memphis then, you see, her sister married Mr. LeMaster. who was a real estate man and he had a little cottage back of his own home on Union Avenue and so we lived there. I can remember how delighted I was, because they had snow and I never had snow before. We went to Idlewild Presbyterian Church and my aunt, Aunt Louise, who we called Oo-Oo, was so sweet to us. She had a great big house and a lot of children and a lot of daughters and everybody there was laughing and gay and she would make waffles for breakfast every morning and I would stop by after my own breakfast and she would give me waffles. She was a very gay, laughing person. And her husband just adored her, Uncle Edward. He never said a word. He made a lot of money and was a good provider and he was a fine man, but a very quiet man.

SUE THRASHER:

Now, was your father in disgrace at Idlewild Presbyterian Church for having been . . . .

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

Well, apparently not. At least, the LeMasters were so prominent in the church and Uncle Edward had done so well and had a big real estate business, and are still a prominent family there, the LeMasters. So, they were just as sweet to us as they could be. But it was hard on my mother, here she had come back home and her husband had been thrown out of the church as a heretic and he was having a nervous breakdown and I remember that he came home for Christmas and went back to French Lick Springs. But then when the spring came on, he got better and in some way, and I don't quite know how this happened, we went back to the parsonage on Rose Avenue. I think that my grandmother had bought it for us, or

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something, because we went back to that same place. Then Daddy went to work for a Mr. Orr, who had been in the church and had a big insurance company. But he sold insurance to black people and I think that Daddy felt rather disgraced selling insurance to black people. He never was much of a business man, but after that, he was in the insurance business for various companies.

Mr. Orr was a lovely man and so was his wife. She was the daughter of John T. Milner, who started Birmingham and they had a lot of children. They were lovely people, just as kind and sweet to my mother and father as they could be and to my brother and sister and me too. Then, my grandmother died, I think, shortly after that and Father inherited quite a lot of money.

He inherited part of the plantation, which was about 35,000 or 40,000 acres and when it was divided up, he still had a big lot of land, 9,000 or 10,000 acres of land, or however much it was, it was a lot of land. And you see, the boll weevil hadn't come then and the tenants were still on the land and the bank still handled it, so we got an income from that I'm sure. Then, grandmother left some money. I know that we moved shortly after she died. We sold the house on Rose Avenue and built a big house on Niazuma, a big brick house and we bought a Packard automobile. So, I'm sure we . . . we also joined the country club, so I'm sure that some money came in at that time. My mother began to lead a much more fashionable life. She would go to tea parties and I can see her now all dressed up . . . . my grandmother had given her a set of furs and Mother would wear a great big hat with plumes on it and then she would wear her furs and pin violets to her furs and she would smell like violet cologne, Richard Hudnutt's Violet Toilet Water was what she always smelled like. I thought that she was the most beautiful creature in the world and smelled the best. She was a pretty woman. She never learned to play bridge, but she used to go to a lot of luncheons and

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teas and she had a friend named Mrs. Maben, who was a very fashionable woman, and a friend named Mrs. Catniss, who was very fashionable. She belonged to a literary club called the Cadmean Circle where all the leading ladies belonged. Well, the Cadmean Circle was a great institution in Birmingham and was supposed to be just the ultimate of all the proper ladies. But they had to have papers, so they had to have some sense, they couldn't be just fashionable, a group of frivolous ladies. It was both social and literary and Miss Willie Allen, who had a private school, was unknown the leader. You know who Cadmeus is, he sowed teeth, didn't he, and that's where warriors sprang up. It's Greek mythology, as I recall, he was a Greek and sowed teeth and warriors sprang up. Well anyway, it met every Friday afternoon and everybody, at least my mother and I think that most other ladies did the same thing, before the Cadmean Circle met, every window was washed, every bit of woodwork was washed, upstairs and down. Every floor was polished and . . . .

[TAPE 2, SIDE A]

VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:

the china was washed, the silver was polished, the sandwiches and oh, you know, the delicate little sandwiches and the mints and the nuts and the coffee and the tea and everything was perfect. And the flowers, because this was the day that you were judged, all your contemporaries came in and judged you. If there was dust underneath the rug or anything was dirty, then you were slipping and all the rugs were cleaned. Everything was cleaned. It was like the great spring cleaning all rolled into one and just everything was cleaned. I loved it, because they would always have salted almonds and mints and mother would bring

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them to me in the corner of her handkerchief. You could see that I was always looking out for something to eat. [Laughter] That was one of my troubles. So, Mother used to come home from the Cadmean and tie them up in the corner of her handkerchief unknown And the ladies in those days were dressy unknown and everybody wore big hats and chiffons and pearls and white gloves and they would discuss literary subjects. Mother had to write papers and it was a terrible time, everybody had to stop everything an Mother would go to the library and do a tremendous research job and she did very good papers, I understand. The ultimate of Birmingham, or at least of the Birmingham that I grew up in was the Cadmean Circle. I even began to get . . . you see, we belonged to the country club and we lived in this neighborhood, it's no longer fashionable but it was then, on Niazuma Avenue, which is right at the edge of Red Mountain and we had a Packard automobile and we must have had more money than we had later. So, I went to public school but I was beginning to be conscious of social distinctions. My best friend at that time, (I had had a lot of friends around Rose Avenue,) but I made new friends whose mothers were sort of fashionable ladies and Pauline Mabin was one that lived in my neighborhood and she and I were great friends. Pauline was a very timid child and she was always scared of dogs; was always just terrified of dogs. So, my mother said that if we would bend down and look at dogs through our legs, they would run away. So, we would and you know, they would run away. [Laughter] I'll tell you that in case you ever get caught by a dog, if you bend down and look at them through your legs, they will run away. You see, in those days, you would have an answer for everything, this was a great time when nothing was

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left undecided, there were always answers - whether right or wrong. You talk about the homemade bread. Well, I had a cousin, that was one of the Weakley's too, I forget which, but he married a lady from Minnesota, a Yankee lady. They had a little daughter about my age and she had a birthday party and I remember going to it and we played drop the handkerchief and had ice cream and cake and she was sort of a pale, blue-eyed child and the wife was a kind of a pale, blue-eyed woman. And the cousin, one day he just disappeared. Nobody ever knew what happened to him and nobody to this day I think, unknown knows what happened to him. He just disappeared. At that time, that happened rather often, you know, husbands just disappeared rather than get a divorce or kill their wives or whatever, they just disappeared. [Laughter] One of them here in our County stayed away for thirty years and then he came back. He went to the depot in a hack and then he was