[TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF 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 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. The high land
was considered to be immune to malaria, I
don't think that it was, 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 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 that had any money, any gold. The
Confederate money had gone 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
took the horses into the swamps and 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 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 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 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 ran that whole place.
I don't know how many people there were on the plantation.
They 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
scuppernong arbor. Most everything came off the place except sugar and .
. . . well, salt, sugar, I think, and coffee 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 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 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 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 a Garden of Eden and I thought that it was the most perfect place in the
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.
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. She
had two carriages besides two or three buggies and one carriage was an
open carriage, a Victoria and she had matched
horses, bays, sort of reddish horses. And there was a coachman with a
high silk hat, named Washington. I 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 bliss. And I adored it, I was absolutely entranced
by it. Granny Foster would go to church and in the winter, she 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 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 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
and Daddy. There were only four when I grew up. The rest of them had
either died or been killed in the war. My Uncle Hugh
lived across the street from my grandmother, and
my Uncle Robert 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. 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. He 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.
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 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 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 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 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 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. But 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 mother was Josephine
Rice and they lived in the Tennessee Valley at a place called Somerville. And I was brought up on the tale about
this huge brick house in the Tennessee Valley [1](n1)
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 tell them
that your people were from Virginia, but they
always look at you like there is something peculiar there, because
nobody would have left Virginia if they were doing, 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 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 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 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, came down 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
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 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. 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,
we were constantly being accused of being
part of a conspiracy to overthrow the government by force or violence,
particularly in the Eastland hearings. I
often thought that it was 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 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
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,
and Uncle Malcolm
pardoned them and that absolutely ruined his political life. He was at
that time considered to be sort of the rising
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 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 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 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 . . .
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF 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 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, 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 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 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 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 her. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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
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 "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 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, "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 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 disg