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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview G-0023-1, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Virginia Foster Durr discusses her early life and how she became aware of the social justice problems plaguing twentieth-century America. Descended from a wealthy southern family that emigrated to Alabama during the early 1800s, she begins by telling stories she heard from her grandmother about life in the antebellum South. She explains what life was like on the plantation when she was a child, focusing on race relations between her family and the black workers employed by her grandmother. Her grandmother practiced noblesse oblige, giving gifts and parties to the poorer white and black families in her community. Throughout the interview, Durr reflects on her relationship with her father, addressing his disappointment in the fact that she was a girl and listing his various disciplinary methods. While Durr's parents carefully maintained an aura of condescending tolerance toward the blacks they employed, not all of her relatives were as gentle.
After the death of her grandmother, Durr's parents advanced in Birmingham society, joining the country club and other social organizations. She repeatedly returns to the issues surrounding southern female gender identity, especially for elite women. She talks about how her social circle dealt with issues of sexuality and describes the racial and class divisions that ran through Birmingham during her youth. As teenagers, Durr and her sister Josephine, along with many other young southern belles, were sent to New York City for finishing and socialization. While there, Josephine met and married Hugo Black, the future Supreme Court Justice. Durr asserts that while her sister and Hugo Black had a happy marriage, the relationship stifled something within her sister. Nevertheless, the other women in her family never questioned the roles and even averred that women who fought for more rights had immoral reasons. Durr managed to convince her parents to send her to Wellesley for two years. While there, she began to question many of the assumptions that had governed her relationships and behaviors while in Alabama. Because of financial problems, Durr left Wellesley after her sophomore year, returning home to spend a year as a debutante. When she failed to find an eligible offer that year, she took a job at the law library, where she met her future husband, Clifford.
Virginia Foster Durr discusses her early life and how she became aware of the social justice problems plaguing twentieth-century America. In this first part of a three-interview series, Durr describes her life on the plantation when she was a child; race issues in Birmingham, where she grew up; and how her views began to change when she left Birmingham to attend Wellesley College.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
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?
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
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.
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.
Now, how old was your father during the war?
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
Did your grandfather have slaves?
Oh heavens, yes.
What happened to them?
Well, all I ever heard was that the slaves were so loyal that "old Mose"
hid the silver and
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
I don't know how many people there were on the plantation.
Where were you living? Were you living on the plantation?
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
Then my grandmother would take us to town, the little town of Union
Springs.
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
How many brothers and sisters did your father have?
Well, Uncle Hugh and Uncle Robert and Aunt May
About what years were those?
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
Did your father come . . . he went to Heidelberg and Edinburgh and came back to Memphis?
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
He was originally from Alabama?
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
But my Grandfather Patterson, Josiah Patterson,
Josiah Patterson is your mother's father?
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 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.
That's where I'm from.
Shiloh, Mississippi?
No, Savannah, but it's right near there, about ten miles from Shiloh.
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,
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 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
Do you remember what year that was?
Oh, that was in the early 1900's.
And your mother was married to your father and living in Birmingham at the time?
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 Memphis.
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
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
This is your sister-in-law?
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]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
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.
And that's where you were living when you were born?
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
No, I don't even know what it is.
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
Were both of the servants black?
Oh yes. And oh, Sally used to cook wonderful breakfasts too, like grits
and gravy and broiled chicken and sweet potatoes. She never would
Now, how much older were Sterling and Josephine than you?
Well, my sister was about four years older and he was about five or six years older.
Sterling was the oldest?
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
Was this church a status church?
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?
No.
Well, as for that, . . . . I was all of seven, so she must have been ten
or eleven and
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.
She lived in New York?
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
Not by her husband's money?
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
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.
The barbeque was in the backyard?
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.
Was Elizabeth your age or about your age?
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."
So, how did you respond when your cousin said that?
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
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
So, the mother-in-law was . . . .
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
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
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 left on her own?
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
Then, the next thing that happened was that my father was thrown out of the church.
And how old were you when that happened?
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
So, the church was full of fine, upstanding citizens?
Fine, upstanding citizens.
Monied citizens.
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.
Do you remember how old you were then? You were about seven or eight?
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
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.
Now, was your father in disgrace at Idlewild Presbyterian Church for having been . . . .
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
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
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
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
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.
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,
And you always made homemade bread for Cliff?
Oh yes, not always, but a great deal of the time.
But the point that I'm getting at is that while the structure of society was changing all around us, you see, Birmingham was a new town and people were coming in from all over and there were strikes and labor and capital and racial troubles, I was completely immune to all of it. It was as though I had never even broken the shell. I lived on the South Side. Now we did have the big break with the Presbyterian church. The preacher that came after my father was named Dr. Edmunds, well, it was Dr. Plunkett first and he just up and died in the pulpit, he was an old man. Then the next one that came on was Dr. Henry Edmunds and he was a young man who had been the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church here and in Montgomery.
You continued going to your father's church after he was kicked out of the pulpit?
Yes we did. This was a matter of pride, you see.
Your father went too?
Yes, this was a matter of pride. My father wasn't going to let them think
that he had been run out of the church. They didn't take away his
membership, they just made it impossible for him to get a church. As I
say, this was a matter of pride, not letting people know that they had
hurt you. Then, when Dr. Edmunds came along, they began on him about the
literal interpretation of the Bible and he was a younger man than my
father and a very fine preacher, (my father was too, I understand,) but
Dr. Edmonds broke the church in two. It divided and my father went with
Dr. Edmunds across the street. The Weakleys, of course, and the Barrons
all stayed in the old church. But we went across the street and started
worshipping in the Temple, the Jewish Temple, the Temple Emmanuel. You
see, they had their services on Saturday and we used the Temple Emmanuel
on Sunday. At that time, I was going to school at the Lakeview School
and my best friends were a group of Jewish boys and I must say
Now, is this in the 'teens, or . . . .
No, this was . . . let's see, I must have been about ten when we left Rose Avenue and went over to Niazuma, I must have been about ten maybe and this was when I was eleven or twelve and thirteen. It was barely the beginning of the 'teens.
And you were born in 1903?
Yes. So, this was before the war. The war came on in 1918, or we got into it, of course, it started in 1914.
In 1918, I was fifteen,
You were friends with them in school . . . did you socialize with them at all?
Well, that's what I'm getting to. We could play, you see, in those days
you played outdoors under the lights at night. Children don't do that
anymore, they watch television, I think. After supper we'd all go
out—that was on Rose Avenue and Niazuma too—and we'd all meet, the
children would. We'd play under the street lights, games and such, and
nobody did have television and we only went to the movies very rarely
and that was our amusement, we amused ourselves. The older people would
sit on the porch and rock, you know, and it was a neighborhood. You see,
neighborhoods then were very important because that was were you amused
each other and yourself, was to sit on the porch, the neighbors would
drop in and children go out to play . . . Beck, Adolph Beck, his father
was a great friend of Hugo Black's it turned out later. Anyway, these
Jewish boys I was just devoted to, and they were devoted to me and we'd
call up and do our lessons with each other over the phone, you know, and
compare our grades. And the smartest one was Isadore Besitch—you know,
that's the great big department store—and he always made just a few more
marks than anybody did, but he wasn't a member of the group he was sort
of an ‘outsider.’ See, even in the Jewish community there was a great
deal of social . . . there were Eastern Jews who originally went to the
synagogue, but the German Jews who went to the
Was there a large Jewish community in Birmingham?
Pretty big. You see, there were a lot of mercantile establishments that they owned.
When did they settle there, after the war?
Oh yes, Birmingham was formed after the war. It was just a little village
called Elyton and then the L&N and the Southern crossed there
and it became a great commercial center and then they discovered the
iron ore and the coal and the limestone all right there in that valley
and so it became a great center of coal, pig iron and United States
Steel and Tennessee Iron, Coal and Railway Company and then the Woodward
Iron Company and Republic Iron and all the great big steel companies.
When I was growing up, people didn't think about pollution then. The air
was so full of dirt that you couldn't go out without having your nose
and throat stop up and your white gloves get dirty. Birmingham was
prosperous. If the air was clean then everybody was down and out. Now, I
knew that much, but it was as distant from me as though it was another
country. I never even went to those places. My life consisted entirely
of downtown Birmingham, Highland Avenue and the South Side and what lay
beyond that was just a foreign country as far as I was concerned. The
people that lived in it might as well not have existed. My whole life
was concentrated in this social group in this neighborhood. The first
shock that I got was . . . you see, we went to the Temple, the
Presbyterian church went over there and so often on Saturdays, some of
these boys would ask me to go to the Temple with them and I would go to
the Temple with them on Saturday and I remember looking at the various
things connected with the Jewish religion which I thought were very
interesting.
But about this time, this is later, I went to the high school. I had been
to South Highland Public School when I was little and then when we
moved, I went to the Lakeview Public School and I always found school an
absolute joy. Now, this sounds silly I know, but I just adored school. I
was good at school, I loved to read, I was curious, I wanted to know
about the world and I had wonderful teachers. This is what nobody seems
to have anymore, but in my first grade, I had a Miss Taylor who was a
marvelous teacher. She
I remember that
Every summer, we went to Mentone, which was up in the north, the
mountains of north Alabama. There was a young boy up there named Carlton
Wright, who was just about my age. He came from Rome, Georgia. He was
about thirteen or fourteen. Well, we fell in love and nobody objected to
us kissing and hugging, which we did. It was very pleasant indeed. But
you see, he was not regarded as a sexual threat and of course, he
wasn't. He just kissed you good night. We would sit in the hammock
sometimes, but that was my first intimation of any real kind of sexual
feeling. I didn't know what went on except that it was nice and I
enjoyed the kissing and hugging with Carlton. We were all brought up
that way, we didn't even discuss sex. Maybe some of the girls did, but
as far as I know, it was just completely a verboten subject, nobody even
discussed it. We began to say that some girls were "fast" because they
were the girls that kissed all the boys goodnight. But we noticed that
they were more popular than we were.
You weren't fast?
Oh, no. My goodness, heavens! Kissing Carlton was about as far as I went
until I was sixteen or seventeen. Oh no, indeed, I was one of the nicest
girls in Birmingham, you know.
No guilt.
No guilt and no sin attached to it. So, I really knew that there was such a thing as warm loving feelings without any sin or guilt attached to it. But then about this time, . . . this was the beginning of . . . my sister had been to Sweet Briar College. By that time, I was going to dancing school and I began to date and have boyfriends that would come to see me.
And you were still going to public schools in Birmingham?
Yes, still going to public schools in Birmingham.
I must have gotten up to about fifteen, but as I said, I had begun then
to be aware of all the social distinctions, you know, the Jews you
couldn't go with and the Negroes, of course, you couldn't go with and
the people who lived in these outlying districts, that worked in the
steel mills, they just didn't exist. Then even on the South Side, there
were social distinctions. The people who belonged to the country club
and the people that didn't belong to the country club, people who were
Baptists and Methodists and you know, the Presbyterians and the
Episcopalians. I had some Methodist friends, because I remember that
during that period, I went to Bob Jones's revival in a Methodist church.
What did your father and mother do when you got saved?
Oh, I didn't even tell them because I hadn't really been saved, I had just stood up because they asked who was on the side of the Lord and I was terribly embarassed by all of this.
So, this was something that they didn't know about.
No, I didn't even tell them about it because I knew that they wouldn't have approved of it. They would have thought that it was common. To be sung over, you know and prayed over and all. Revivals were considered to be common, it was just ordinary, common people that did that kind of thing.
Then, my father had . . . there was a woman in New York that we called
Aunt Mamie. She had been married to my father's best friend, Mr.
Patterson, no kin, who had been the pastor of a church down here in
Montgomery. And Aunt Mamie had come from Tennessee and Daddy had known
her when he lived at Mt. Pleasant. She had been a very fashionable girl,
she was brought up by her sister since her mother had died and her
sister was very well off. She was fashionable, used to champagne and
four in hand coaches and they all lived in Nashville on Pike Road . . .
or some Pike that everybody lived on. Nashville, you know, was a seat of
fashion and still is in large measure. You had race meetings, you know.
Well, Aunt Mamie was very fashionable. She
They would live with her.
They would live with her and they would be exposed, to culture you see, and Aunt Mamie would get them introduced to boys or an invitation to Annapolis or to West Point or she would introduce them to somebody. She was very big in the Presbyterian church up there. They would get polished, you see.
How did she maintain that kind of image, having married a
Well, she must have had some money, but she had this great big apartment. I'll tell you how it worked. My sister had been to Sweet Briar and Daddy was the guardian of Aunt Mamie's children in some way. And she would come to visit us for long periods of time and she would always get handsome presents out of Daddy. In those days, ladies used to wear french puffs. Do you know what they were?
No.
Well, they were kind of big sausage rolls that they would put on top of
their hair. Their hair was always up, and on top of that they would pin
these artificial french puffs. They were very expensive. And Mother got
furious at Daddy because he bought Aunt Mamie these very expensive
french puffs that must have cost fifty dollars. But she had a way of
getting things out of people. She was a very pretty woman and very sexy
with a great big bosom and a tiny little waist and swelling hips. She
was not a bad woman in any way, she was very virtuous. I'm sure that she
would not have married Mr. Winchester if she hadn't been. He was an
extremely handsome man. Anyway, my sister had been to Sweet Briar and
Aunt Mamie persuaded Daddy to send Sister to her in New York because her
daughter, Ella Vaughan Patterson, had visited us a great deal and she
and sister were friends. She was one of the most beautiful creatures
that I have ever seen. She put every other southern belle that I have
ever known into the shade. She was absolutely gorgeous. She had red-gold
hair that was all curly and great big blue eyes and marvelous
complexion, just beautiful. You see, girls didn't use much make-up in
those days, and she had a marvelous figure. And she
All boys?
All boys, sure. You see, she was extremely pretty and the boys were crazy about her and she was one of the very popular girls. Sister was never sort of an institution like Ella Vaughan Patterson or Blanche Divine, but she was a very pretty girl and the boys were crazy about her. She never said much, she was just so sweet and pretty and they just fell in love with her, you know. But Aunt Mamie, I suppose that she wanted her to board, and she persuaded Daddy to send her to New York, so she did go to New York to live with Aunt Mamie. She stayed there for 2 years and in the course of those years, she took a business course, of all things, and became a secretary. Now, when the war broke out in 1918, she was still in New York and she and Ella Vaughan Patterson joined the Navy as Yeomanetts.
You
And where did your sister Josephine go when she joined the Navy?
Well, she lived with Aunt Mamie.
She stayed in New York?
Yes, she and Ella Vaughan lived with Aunt Mamie but they worked in some
Naval office. They were secretaries. So, Aunt Mamie persuaded my father
to send me up there. She came down to visit, we never got on too well,
Aunt Mamie and I and she told my mother and I heard her say it,
"Virginia is absolutely impossible. She is really impossible. She talks
too much, she
This is a continuation of an interview with Virginia Durr at her home in
Wetumpka, Alabama on March 14, 1975. Yesterday, we took Virginia up
through her childhood until the time that she left to go to Aunt Mamie's
It wasn't a school, it was just, she used to keep girls in her apartment to give them a taste of New York life and some culture and some social life. This was something that southern women did quite a lot. Miss Semple had a famous school called Miss Semple's School, where the girls would go to be polished off. I think that there was always a vague hope that they would meet some rich millionaire Yankee and marry him and bring him home and save the South or the family plantation, the old home or something. That was about the best investment that you could make, to have your daughter marry a rich millionaire. It is very difficult to realize in 1975 how poor the South was then.
It is almost impossible for you younger people to realize the terrible
poverty of the South before 1932 when the New Deal came in. We can try
to express it to you, but since you didn't see it or experience it . . .
now, we never suffered from actual poverty, it was always genteel
poverty where you were trying to keep your best foot forward on very
little money. But we were surrounded by absolutely abject poverty. The
poor whites that lived over the mountain, you see, we lived on Red
Mountain and over the mountain was where the mines were, the coal mines
and the ore mines. And on Saturday mornings, these families would come
into Birmingham, walking, there
Did these people work in the steel mills, or were they farmers?
Oh no, these people worked in the iron ore mines and in the coal mines.
These were the people that lived over the mountain and worked in the
mines, at least the men did. They lived in company houses and they were
paid with company script, mostly. Every time they tried to form a union,
it was broken up. You see, they had replaced the convicts. There had
been a terrible struggle to get the convicts out of the mines and these
poor whites had replaced the convicts. I don't mean to be so rambling,
but the struggle between the poor whites and the Negroes for jobs was
terrible. Most of the convicts were blacks, you had all that in your
magazine, the story
You never read Mike Ross's poem about the Tennessee Valley?
No.
Well, you see, all of this was not Mike Ross in Tennessee who was Don
West's brother-in-law, this was another Mike Ross who was head of the
FEPC, the Fair Employment Practices Commission. He is dead now, but he
wrote a really remarkable poem about the Tennessee Valley. We were
brought up, or at least I was brought up, in the view that this was
ordained by God. It was in the blood. You were
How did people hit upon New York?
Because New York has always been the great center of everything, and still is.
That's where all the rich Yankees lived.
But people didn't go to Richmond or Washington?
No, they wanted to see the theater and the opera and New York was always the center of everything, sophistication and all. If you wanted to get polished off and learn to be cultured, the opera was the great thing, whether you enjoyed it or not. And the theater and the ballet and plays and movies and Times Square and the night clubs and the big hotels and Fifth Avenue. It was a perfectly thrilling city. So, they did decide to send me there and when I got there, Aunt Mamie lived in an apartment on upper Park Avenue, which was in between the very fashionable Park Avenue and the poor . . . Madison Avenue, I believe it was. Anyway, it was kind of in between, it was not quite fashionable and not quite slum, it was between. But she had an enormous apartment and it was all filled with antique furniture that she had brought up from the South, gold pier mirrors and red velvet curtains and mahogany furniture. So, she lived in some style when I first got there. She had a maid come in for dinner.
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
I went to Miss Finch's finishing school, which wasn't nearly as
fashionable as Miss Spence's school, but anyway, I had gotten there kind
of late in the year and I got in Miss Finch's finishing school. But I
just adored New York. You cannot imagine what New York was in those
days, I mean compared to today, you can't believe that it would be the
same city. You could go anywhere and it was perfectly safe. I would walk
in Central Park and I would walk up and down Fifth Avenue and I would
walk back and forth
Well, where did most of the girls come from? Were any of them from the South?
They came from all around. Oh yeah, a few came from the South and all up
through the Middle West and a lot of them from New York. It was a fairly
new school, so it was a kind of . . . the most aristocratic and the
richest girls didn't come there because if they came to New York, they
went to Miss Spence's school, that was the most fashionable school. But
it was a very good school and it built itself up. It was a very
ridiculous thing in a way, because they were educating these girls as
though they were all
Did you ever question that assumption about yourself?
Well, I certainly felt that I hadn't been rich. Nor with a staff of
servants when my staff of servants consisted of one poor Negro woman and
someone coming in to fire the furnace or cut the grass. But I accepted
it. I suppose that I thought maybe I would get a rich husband and have a
large mansion and a staff of servants.
Why did southern belles think of getting Yankee husbands?
Because the southerners were just too poor. You see, that's what I was saying, the . . . .
The international travelers were . . . .
The South was so poor. We were and still are, in my opinion, a colony of the North. After we got beat in the Civil War, they bought us up for a nickel on the dollar or whatever it was and they still own us. You know, when I lived in Birmingham, it was completely a company town, just completely owned by northern corporations and they would come down in their private cars. It was just like being visited by a king or something. Everybody would bow and scrape, you know. The South was defeated. The whole atmosphere of the South at that time was that it was a colony, it was defeated. The northern money and the northern energy and people like Mr. Smith of L&N Railroad were the great heroes. Or the guy over in Atlanta who was preaching industralization, what was his name, the editor?
Grady?
Henry Grady and of course, there was Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee
preaching the same thing: northern money, industralize and bring
I think so.
And I really think that it is the thing that has separated the generations more than anything else, the poverty. Although, I think that you young people have been very brave.
Now, right then, in the pre-World War I period and the twenties, my concept of that is, at least, that it wasn't as bad as it became in the Depression.
No, but my point is that this was the South, the South. The Depression in
the South started very much before the Depression in the rest of the
country. It has always been poor since the Civil War. They still had the
price of cotton fluctuate and the tenant farmer system had started
Scarlett.
Scarlett. Well, she was very typical of the fact that the South was so damn poor.
Were you hostile toward Yankees? Did you have a feeling that you were a southerner and . . . .
Oh my, yes. Yes.
And did you have feeling toward other girls in the school?
Well, I just remember one, which is a perfectly absurd story, but this
happened. I was brought up, you know, to think that a Yankee was a very
bad thing. I remember as a little girl that we would go out and visit
some people in Birmingham named Stevens, I think. Anyway, they were in
my father's church and he had been an old Confederate veteran and he was
a darling man, just as cute as he could be. They had a sort of a farm on
the edge of town and I used to love to go out there and visit. So, I
remember talking to him and I would say, "Oh, Mr. Stevens, I'll never
marry a Yankee." "Oh," he'd say, "Don't you marry one of those
scoudrels." So, I grew up thinking that Yankees were bad people and I
was a southerner you know and all about the slave system before the war.
And I had seen it in
Now, you were going to tell me the story about school.
Oh, well, I was brought up as a southerner, completely as a southerner. I
had never been North until I went up to New York. Well, the crazy thing
about the school was that all these Yankee girls were there and there
was only one other southerner and she was from Montgomery, Alabama. I
won't give you her name because somebody might recognize it. She was a
very beautiful girl and we had to take these Mesendieck Exercises which
were these floating, graceful, learning to walk in and sit down and lie
down and always be graceful. You were supposed to take a shower
beforehand
When we first lived there, she had a maid that would come in and do and dinner was quite formal. We would have a glass of sherry in the parlor and she would have guests in and the dinner would be a real good dinner and we would have coffee afterwards in the parlor and it was all very kind of formal and rather grand. But as the year wore on, this was 1918, when the war ended. When the year wore on, the maid left and didn't come in anymore and Aunt Mamie did something that I found extremely embarassing and I'm sure Sister and Ella Vaughan did too. You see, men were just streaming back and forth through New York going abroad for the war, you see. When did the war end?
It ended in 1918, November 11, 1918.
Well, they were all coming back. Anyway, I can just remember a procession
going through the apartment. Sister and Ella Vaughan had lots of beaus,
you see and so, we were always having the whole icebox . . . like the
Gabor Sisters, you see, except that Sister and Elivon were not that
kind, but it was full of flowers and candy and so forth. But at the same
time, Aunt Mamie was having an awfully hard time, I'm sure, paying the
bills of any kind. So, all of these adoring young men that were
worshiping Sister or Ella Vaughan would invite them out to dinner and
Aunt Mamie would say in her high society manner, "How sweet of you to
invite us all to dinner." And so, she would take us all out to dinner
with these men. Well, I am sure that it embarrased Sister and Ella
Vaughan terribly and I know that it embarrassed me,
Did you have beaus them, too?
Well, no, I didn't. I'll tell you what she finally did with me. She still
thought that I was impossible, I was so tall and thin and nearsighted.
So, what she did was, the Presbyterian church, in which she was
extremely active, the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, they had a
soldier's center, a center where soldiers and sailors of all nations
could come. So, she got me to be a hostess at this center and all of a
sudden, I was plunged into millions of men and very few girls. You
couldn't help but be popular, because you danced and danced. They were
lined up waiting to dance with you. There again, it was the scarcity
value. So, I learned to be quite easy with men. I can't remember them
all now, but I think that one of them was a Norwegian. He couldn't speak
English very much . . .
You've got a superiority complex.
You had gone to New York straight out of public schools in Birmingham.
I had gone to New York straight out of the public schools, but I did very
well in the school, as you can see. I had no trouble with the work,
except that some of it bored me, but mostly I adored the work at the
school. The thing that interested me the most was New York itself,
because you see, I would get home about three o'clock and I could do
anything I wanted to. So what I would do, I would explore New York.
Above us was a Jewish section and I would walk all over the section.
They had wedding shops where these big
Virginia was telling you about the economy of this part of the South during the pre-World War I period. The economic base was cotton. I know that my father, although he was in the wholesale drug business, the first thing that he did in the morning was to look at the cotton exchange report because that meant the difference as to whether the business failed or prospered. The complaint of the South was that we sell our cotton on a free market and we buy our goods on a protected market.
Tariff, you see.
And of course, the tariff. So, when the price of cotton would go down and down, the farmers would have to borrow money to make that crop, they always did that. They would try to make up for it by putting new and more land into cotton.
Which was the only cash crop, really.
It was the only cash crop that we had. And cotton takes a heavy toll on the land, you really have to put the fertilizer in there and they didn't have the money for the fertilizer. So, as a result, you began to get poorer and poorer land in the South and you would have the erosion from the cultivation of this poor land. Before the New Deal, one of the things that I noticed about the landscape of the South, driving down these roads, you saw these gullied farms and you never saw a farm house with any paint or fences that weren't down. It looked miserable and then the New Deal started out with the soil conservation programs and paid farmers money to get out of these row crops and put more land into pastures and timber and things of that sort. So, the beauty of the landscape began to . . . .
To come up again.
But cotton was just a desperate means of existence. You were really mining the land, which was the expression that we used. I can remember that even during World War I, trying to do something about it, it became a patriotic duty of the businessmen to do it, to buy bale cotton at 10¢ a pound, the price was around 6¢ or 8¢, something like that, so they were trying to bring up the price artificially by buying it at 10¢ a pound.
A patriotic duty.
Yes, that was a patriotic duty.
Well, my father, you see, even if he had his 9,000 or 10,000 acres,
however much it was, he had to furnish the tenants, who were all
Oh, yes.
You know, they get supplements in school, are fed in school, and it is just remarkable.
Did your father continue to take an interest and oversee the acreage that he had?
No, no. That was one of the things that I'm sure he . . . no, he left it all to the bank manager, whoever it was.
So, he really didn't . . . .
Oh, he would go down there . . . .
After your grandmother died, he didn't go down there much?
He'd go down there but he never ran the plantation. Daddy was never a businessman at all. He was a scholar and a preacher and then he sold insurance, which he always hated to do. Poor man, he just felt that it was terribly beneath him to try to get some poor black or white to buy insurance. But he did it because he had to support his family.
But he couldn't be a gentleman farmer and make a living?
Oh no, no. Never, never, never.
I don't suppose that Daddy ever pulled up a weed in his life. He never
did anything with his hands that I can recall. Daddy would sit by a fire
like that and if it started going out, he was just used to yelling,
"Jim! Joe!" You know, and some black boy would come in and put a log on,
or some black woman. So, when he didn't have any more black persons to
call, my mother or even I would come in and put the wood on the fire. It
never occurred to him to just reach over and put the wood on the fire.
Okay, let's go back to New York now. You were there for a year?
Well, yes, I went up there and was there about a year. It was a
fascinating experience for me, because as I say, I explored all of New
York. Then, I got to see some of the plays, I remember Fred and Adele
Astair. I thought they were the most marvelous things that I had ever
seen. And Marilyn Miller, you don't remember her, I'm sure, but well
were the great stars of the musical comedy stage and they were
absolutely marvelous. So, it was really quite an experience for me, but
I wasn't very happy at Aunt Mamie's. Aunt Mamie never did come to terms
with me because I was really, I suppose, an obnoxious child. I was
always wanting to know why and Aunt Mamie used to read the society
columns all the time. She had a passion for New York society, which she
was hardly a member of although she always claimed that she could have
been if only Mr. Winchester had been a millionaire. But he wasn't. But
through Ella Vaughan, some of the young men that came to the house were
very rich young men, so Aunt Mamie had a passion for reading the society
columns and Vogue and Harper's
Bazaar, you know, and Town and Country and
finding out where the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers and so on were
going. So, I remember saying to her one day, "Aunt Mamie, why
What was your relationship like with your sister then?
Oh, very devoted, I just adored my sister. It's a strange thing, I say so often that I thought she was prettier and more popular and my father loved her to death and all, but I never was jealous of her. Maybe unconsciously I was, but I have no conscious memory of it. In fact, I always felt sorry for her. Now, that's a strange thing, but don't you think that I always felt sorry for Sister?
Yes. Ever since I was in the family.
Well, Sister was a very sensitive person. She had pride and her feelings
got hurt very easily and she was very sensitive and just every little
thing hurt her. She was very happy in New York and she loved it, she was
independent and making her own money and she was with the Navy and
having a wonderful time and as I remember, she was just as happy and
healthy as she could be. She just adored it. So, it really was a very
good year for me, because I did learn a lot. I wasn't particularly happy
in my relationship to Aunt Mamie, but I adored Ella Vaughan, her
daughter and thought she was beautiful and sweet. It was a very
interesting year. But I came home in the summer. Now, Sister stayed on
until she was released from the Navy and then she wanted to stay on in
New York, she wanted to come home for a visit and then go on back,
because she loved, I think, being independent.
She was about four and a half years older than you, almost my age.
Well, let's see, if I was sixteen, she would then have been twenty,
twenty-one. She was very young still and he was about thirty-five.
Anyway, he had just come back from the Army and had been a major and he
lived up the street from us in a house with a lot of other bachelors and
he would walk by the house every day. He was a great believer in
exercise
Now, Cliff's father, when I met Mr. John L. Lewis the first time, you know that he lived in Alexandria, he knew the name immediately. He said, "Durr. From Alabama?" I said, "Yes." He said, "I knew your father-in-law very well." I said, "How in the world did you know my father-in-law?" He said, "Your father-in-law was on Governor Kilby's committee." They had a big United Mine Workers strike under Governor Kilby, I forget what year it was, but anyway, Governor Kilby appointed a committee, one of whom was Cliff's father. He came up to Birmingham and examined the causes for the strike and came to the conclusion that the mine companies were the most benevolent, paternalistic, high-minded, splendid organizations in the world. They even built churches for their people, you know, and they had a hospital for them. So, they immediately declared that the strike was no good and it was broken and so Mr. Lewis remembered Mr. Durr very well. Well, you see, he was one of the best men in the world, but he thought that the coal companies were just wonderful.
He did. He thought George Gordon Crawford was one of the greatest men alive.
That was the head of the Tennessee Coal and Iron and Railroad Company.
So, these southern men, you see, had a great admiration for the southern
men who had succeeded with the Yankee corporations. They had made it in
the big time, they had really made it with the Wall Street Yankees, you
see. It is all impossible for you to realize at your age, the power that
Mr. Smith of the L&N Railroad had. You'll have to read The Origins of the New South by Vann Woodward or my
son-in-law, Sheldon Hackney's book called From Populism to
Progressiveism. You will see, the power that these corporations
had in the South and the way that they were looked up to as the
salvation of the South. Well, anyway, I came back from New York and
Sister came back and then I went to the public high school again for
another year. That was when Hugo was courting Sister. He never missed a
When he started out to do something, he did it.
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
Well, he was a wonderful influence on me because he would bring me books
to read and he thought I had some brains. He brought me the Beard's
books, I remember, Mary and Charles Beard's books and he brought me
Parrington, The Main Currents of American Thought,
books that I was astonished to read, I was amazed that he would bring
them to me, but he really did. He brought me all kinds of books to read
and he would talk to me like I was an equal and he would explain things
to me and all about labor unions. He really had a tremendous influence
on me and I just adored him. I was his great champion, I thought that he
was wonderful. He was an extraordinarily attractive man. He was very
lively and very bright and terribly energetic. I went, as I said, that
year to the high school in Birmingham and then that following summer,
Sister went up to Mentone, we would go up to Mentone every summer and I
can remember Hugo going up to see her and taking Mother and me with him,
you know and he was pursuing her up there. she had some beaus up on the
mountain, too. He never left off one single minute. Then, that following
fall, that must have been 1920, I imagine, I went to the Cathedral
School in Washington. I don't know what happened then, Daddy must have
sold something but a lot of my friends were going up to the Cathedral
School in Washington and it was supposed to be a very fine, fashionable
and good school and all the nicest girls went. So, I
What was the attitude toward college? You sister, Josephine, never considered going to college?
Yes, she would have gone to college, but we were poor then. You see, she did go off to Sweet Briar for a year or so, but you see, we varied so. Sometimes we had money and sometimes we didn't. I don't know whether it was the cotton going up or down or Daddy would sell something or what happened, maybe he would sell more insurance. You see, I was never told anything. Mother and Daddy never would discuss money. It was considered common to talk about money.
Had she gone to Sweet Briar before she was a Yeomanette?
Yes.
She had had a year.
Yes.
But by and large, the attitude was that young ladies would go to finishing school and not go to college?
Oh, sure. You were just a bluestocking intellectual if you went to
college. But the Cathedral School, some of the girls did go to college
and they were encouraged to go to college. But of course, the great
majority of them didn't. They came home and made their debut and then
married well. Now, when I came home that summer, I had passed most of my
college boards and finally, my father was the one that . . . I wasn't
his favorite, but he was the one that was convinced that I had brains
enough to go to college . . . .
But anyway, I came home for Christmas vacation and at that time, Sister
had I can't tell you how many beaus trying to marry her. She just was
surrounded by young men trying to marry her. And instead of making her
conceited, it made her very sorrowful. She couldn't marry all of them,
you know, and she was terribly weepy over the
A prosperous merchant for Ashland.
For Ashland.
How much of a reputation as a radical did he have?
A terrific reputation as a radical.
It didn't seem to bother them too much?
Well, Mother and Daddy didn't know what a Bolshevik was, I don't think, really. They were not part of this group, they were not part of the group that controlled the town. They weren't part of the corporate group, you see.
And even though he was considered Bolshevik, he was in the country club and . . . .
He was very popular and he had other lady friends. He had had them before
he went with Sister. He was considered quite eligible, as a catch. If
you weren't part of the corporate fight that was going on . . . you see,
there was terrible warfare, class warfare in Birmingham between the
corporations and the labor unions, they were just crushing the labor
unions generally. Hugo represented the carpenters and the mineworkers
and the railway unions and the thing that he did, as I told you before,
he got these tremendous verdicts for them before these juries . . . you
see,
Also, you were exempt from poll tax if you had been in the Army.
Yeah, you were exempt, so you could vote. So, they were determined that
they were not going to be paid the way that they were and live the way
that they were. There was a radical feeling in the air. Then, the other
opposite end of the pole was that a great many black men had been in the
army and they had been in France and the word came back that they had
been sleeping with white women. Well, these two things worked against
each other, because the white men wouldn't let the blacks into the
unions and they wouldn't organize on an integrated basis. On the other
hand, the word was spread by the corporations that the blacks were going
to organize; they arous all the southern passions by saying that these
blacks had come back after sleeping with white women in France and they
were going to try to sleep with white women in the South. And all the
old passions of sexual . . . the dreadful sexual cesspool, I call it,
came to the surface. There were terrible things done then, you know,
lynchings and dreadful things done to the black soldiers. It was
designed to make them go back in their place and not think that because
you were in the United States Army, you can get
That was before the war.
Well, anyway, he knew Birmingham inside out and upside down and the poor folks, the black folks, the white folks, the labor folks and he had become quite a figure, but anti-corporation, you see. The corporation people absolutely hated him because he encouraged unions and then, he got these verdicts in the courts. But the unions were broken, they were helped as I said, by Cliff's father and the National Guard was called out. So, the Ku Klux Klan was formed at that point as a kind of underground union and unless you were there and knew it, nobody will believe it. They will say, "Oh, but the Klan was against the unions." Well, it wasn't. They had tried to form unions. They had tried to make themselves politically effective and they were defeated, so that's when they flocked into the Klan. And all over the South, you see, these returning soldiers flocked into the Klan, these white soldiers. They flocked in because one, they had been determined to get more money and they were determined to be politically effective and they felt that they could only do this by a secret organization. The bad part of it was that they were determined that these black soldiers would not be able to think that they were going to sleep with white women. And not only that, they were against the Catholics and against the Jews, too, but not nearly so much. I don't think that it was so much anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic feeling as it was anti-black.
So, at the Klan meetings then, did they talk about unions and . . . .
I never went to one, but I've been to many a Klan parade. I just took it
for granted, I never thought anything of it. You see, my grandfather had
been in the Klan. I told you that he fought for Nathan Bedford Forrest,
who formed the Klan, so my grandfather had been in the Klan and I always
thought of it as something noble and grand and patriotic that had saved
the white women of the South. I remember seeing the horrible movie
called The Klansman . . . .
Birth of A Nation.
Birth of A Nation. Oh, I thought that it was the most
thrilling, dramatic and marvelous thing in the world when the Klan rode
in there and rescued the poor white girl from the black soldier and all.
You see, you can't imagine the contradictions in my life, the total
contradictions. I had been surrounded by black men all my life. The old
men at the plantation, I sat on their laps, you know and thought they
were sweet, lovely old men. You know, the mailman, the yard man, the
furnace man, I had been surrounded by black men all my life. Not one of
them had ever been anything but kind and decent to me. I had never been
afraid of a single one of them, it never crossed my mind that a black
man would make an indecent attempts, or a white man either, for that
point. I didn't know what they would do. I didn't know what rape was, I
kept hearing about it, but I didn't know what rape was. I was scared to
ask. These terrible inhibitions had been driven into me on sex and I was
frightened to ask what rape was and I was scared that it would be
revealed to be something that I didn't want to know. But then at the
same time, I would go to see the Birth of A Nation and
believe that the Klan was a great organization, very noble and wonderful
and proud that my grandfather had been a member of it. So, the fact that
they said Hugo Black was a member of the Klan, it didn't affect
They were heroes.
They were heroes. Well, I got a terrible distaste for kissing,
And did you have any trouble with that attitude when you were at the Cathedral School?
No, all the other girls believed it too, all the southern girls did.
All of the girls were from the South?
Most of them were, not all of them, but the ones that were from the South
all believed it, too. There was never any discussion of it. The thing
that I think is so hard for this age to remember was that there was
never any discussion of these things. Nobody told you these things,
nobody ever sat down and said, "Now, you've got to believe that the War
Between the States was . . . ", you just automatically did believe that
the slave system had been a benevolent system. I can remember my
grandmother telling me, "Well, honey, I just feel so sorry for those
poor people. When they lived with us " . . . she never said, "When we
owned them . . . " "When they lived with us, they were so happy and we
looked after them and took care of them when they were sick and looked
after them when they were old." Of course, there they were in the back
yard, beirg fed and living in those little clean houses and I imagine
they were being looked after when they were sick and they did look happy
to me. She would say, "Oh, it's not us,
They were uncouth?
Totally uncouth, but also very miserable people and always with either
tobacco or snuff dripping down. They were always yellow somehow, I think
that it must have been malaria. And they had pellagra and hookworms and
they bred like rabbits. I remember that phrase that was used a great
deal, "they breed like rabbits." They were just beyond the Fale
completely. I'm sure that you were taught the same thing up there in
Tennessee. Weren't you taught about poor white trash and didn't your
mother and father look
Yes. They weren't quite that far below us, though.
Well, then you see, the blacks were completely outside everything. They were just completely another entire group. Of course, we were surrounded by them the entire time, they were in the house all the time, your life depended on them all the time and you loved them dearly, but they were just outside. They were just another whole group. So you see, by the time I got to the Cathedral School, I accepted all this and everybody else in the school accepted it. If there was any protest against it, I never heard it. As I said, the lady that was the head of the school was always making us feel that because we didn't go to Foxcroft or Westover or some other very fashionable schools, where the richest girls went, that she really had come down in the world. You see, it was a class society and we southern girls were just as impressed by it as we could be, because you see, we really were not as rich as the Yankee girls were. Now, a tiny few number of girls finally got to Foxcroft, which Miss Noland ran in Virginia, which was supposed to be the richest school of all and Miss Charlotte Noland ran that and she ran it on the most snobbish lines possible to attract the richest girls there and she succeeded.
Anyway, I was called back from the Cathedral School because Sister finally decided to marry Hugo.
Now, what year was this?
This was 1920, February of 1920, as I recall. I was the maid of honor.
Well, when I got home, I found that things were all in a great state of
excitement because Hugo had said to my mother that they either had to
have 10,000 people to the wedding, because he was already then thinking
about politics
And he was what, in his middle thirties by that time?
Yes. He absolutely worshipped her and I never saw a man love a woman more than he did or work harder to get her. He did everything he could in his power to make her happy, except give her her freedom. He gave her everything that he could think of to give her and there was not a wish of her heart that he didn't satisfy. But she never had one hour's freedom from that time on.
She was Mrs. Hugo Black.
She was Mrs. Hugo Black. And he expected her to subordinate herself to his life and his ambitions and it never occurred to him otherwise. I don't think that he ever realized that she would want to be free and do something that she wanted to occasionally. He was not only terribly kind to her but he was kind to her family. He helped us out a lot and assumed a great deal of obligation when my mother and father lost everything. But she was always in a state of dependence, total dependence. But you know, his daughter, who was entirely different from my sister, she had been to college and was much more independent, but you know where he wanted to send her? Sweet Briar College. He wanted her to be just like her mother. He wanted her to be a sweet southern lady and beuatiful and charming. And Sister was all of those things, she was beautiful and sweet and charming and everybody adored her and he above all. But I don't think that Sister ever was able, after she married, to have a free moment hardly. But that was the way that girls were supposed to be anyway, you see. There was no question about that. The suffrage movement was just starting about then and there was a lady who lived above us in the neighborhood named Mrs. Patty Jacobs who was a leader of the suffrage movement. She was a very handsome woman and I used to see her a lot and I knew her family and all and Mother and Daddy would say, "Oh, poor Mr. Jacobs, think of that wife he's got, running all over the country and the town and getting votes for women, getting votes for women." And Mother would say, "Well, you know, I think that Mrs. Jacobs likes men."
Mrs. Jacobs was in your neighborhood, though, she was a wealthy class woman?
She was an upper class woman, I don't know how wealthy she was, but she was well off and a handsome woman.
She wasn't one of the common people?
Oh, no. No, no.
What did you think about Mrs. Jacobs?
I just assumed and believed what Mother said, that she was doing it because she liked men.
You see, liking men was supposed to be quite a sin in those days. Any
woman that was considered fast or painted her face or was too . . .
there was a very beautiful woman in Birmingham named Mrs. Barrett, who
had been married three or four times and was a very handsome woman and
the Whisper was that she liked men, which meant that she was a fast
woman and that was a terrible sin. I remember that when I was a little
older, Zelda Sayre, she was the most beautiful of all, of course, and
the most popular, but the whisper was that she liked men. You see,
liking men meant that you were fast, that you were . . . you were
supposed to be "chased and chaste," if you know what I mean. You were
supposed to be totally pure and be terribly attractive to men, but not
give them an inch. Because if you did, that might involve your ruin, I
suppose and then you would be banished, packed off to New Jersey.
You're not talking about any kind of . . . of other . . .
Any girls in my class or my group, they're the only ones that I knew.
No, you're not saying anything about your objection to it. I'm surprised that you weren't a little more . . .
Not at this time, not at this time. See, my great fear was that I wouldn't be popular. Cliff says that I had a superiority complex, but he's wrong, I didn't. I had been told from my infancy that I was too big, too raw-boned, near-sighted, that I asked too many questions and I never was given the image, except by my mother who adored me and she always said, "Now dear, if you will just do this or that, you will be beautiful and you will be charming." Then, I wasn't any great belle, you see. I had a few boys that came around, but they . . . .
Well, you were certainly no wall flower.
This was when I was in my teens, not after I got older. Then, I was more
popular, but the thing was that in my teens, I really wasn't one of the
more popular girls. We had the most awful system then, good God, it was
enough to scare you to death. If you got invited to a party or a dance,
the hostess even, not just a fraternity or a club, they would put the
girls' names on a list at a drugstore and then the boys would check your
name. It was a display, the list of girls was on the cigar counter, I
think,
It worked.
It worked okay. I would be broken in on at the country club and I would get checked for the dances and so I finally got so where I was okay. But I was always a little anxious, I never had that feeling of being irresistable that the belles had.
Did the fact that you had gone away to New York and to the Cathedral School give you status?
Honey, nothing gave you status in those days but being popular with the
boys. I mean, you could be beautiful, you could be rich, you could go to
Paris to school. If you weren't popular with the boys . . . look, I know
some of the girls in Birmingham whose families were the richest, who
went to Foxcroft, who had thousands of dollars spent on their clothes
and they would invite the boys to dinner and give them filet mignon or
three or eight courses and they never got checked for the dances. You
see, the boys absolutely ruled the social life. They were the ones that
determined whether a girl was or was not popular. Because you see, the
thing was that marriage being our only outlet or the only thing that we
could do, the boys had to ask us. We were totally at their mercy and
attracting men and being attractive to men and getting a nice beau and
the best marriage that you could was our only ambition and our only
future, our only career. So, naturally, the boys were in total command
of the situation, they were the ones that asked us. It was only the
girls that were so popular that they could play one man off against
another who had power. Now there was a girl who lived across the street
from me who got engaged, I think, to seven men at the same time. Maybe
just only five, I can't remember . . .
Now, were you more concerned about being popular and marrying well or were you also concerned about going off to college?
I had a split personality, I wanted to do both. I really think that the
reason that my mother finally came over to be willing to send me up to
Wellesley . . . Daddy really thought that I had some brains and he
wanted to see that I got a college education. Daddy had a splendid
library, you see and I History of England, Green's History of
England and all of Dickens, all of Scott, most of Eliot and I had read
Quizot's History of France even, a good bit of it. And
they had The Book of Knowledge, I had gone through
that. I was an omnivorous reader. One reason was that I was so
near-sighted you see and I was very poor at sports. I never could play
tennis or golf, I could swim, but they never would let me wear glasses,
you see. I didn't get
When I would date her, her mother would hide the glasses.
Yeah, Mother would . . . .
In the days before talking movies, they would flash these signs up and . . . .
I never did get to read a thing. I could hardly see Margaurite Clark or
Mary Pickford or Wallace Reid, who was my hero. No, Mother thought that
glasses would just ruin your chances and I could never wear them at
dances or parties, you see, when I finally got a pair. And I was
terribly near-sighted, I couldn't see the leaves on the trees, even.
Everything was a blur, but when I finally got glasses, my God, Mother
would hide them if I was going to a party, she was so scared that I
would put them on. I know that it all sounds ridiculous, but it was
absolutely the truth. So, you see, I was divided. I wanted to be popular
more than anything and to be a belle and have a lot of proposals and
have everybody adore me and get flowers and candy and beaded bags and
plumes . . . the great thing then was fans made out of plumes, oh, that
was the great thing, to have a fan made out of plumes that your
boyfriend would send you. I'll bet that you never saw one. Well, you saw
The Great Gatsby didn't you?
I haven't seen it.
Well, you see The Great Gatsby and at least you will
know how we looked. Now you see, I never belonged to the Jazz Age. In
Birmingham, there was a fast set that drank gin and so on, but I never
belonged to that at all, because I was a "nice girl." I went mostly with
nice young men and occasionally, I would get caught with a drunk, which
was pretty sad. Because you would go to a dance with a body and you
would spend all day long getting ready. We would take bubble baths . . .
somehow we thought that if you took a bubble bath, you would be
irresistible.
. . . your slippers and your stockings and your underwear and your powder and paint and lipstick, rouge and your hair curled and your dress, usually some sort of satin or tulle or chiffon and oh, you really looked like a beautiful flower when you really got it all done. And your mother would be there, you know, powdering your back and then you had to have the right kind of little evening bag and it was really a terrific preparation. And you would go with some boy to a dance and by God, he would get drunk. In those days, you see, the liquor was mostly bootleg liquor and some of the boys got what they called . . . what did they call it, Cliff?
Jake-Leg.
Tell her what Jake-Leg was.
Well, Jake-Leg, they'd drink wood alcohol which would affect the spinal chord and leave them crippled.
Oh yeah, they would be crippled. There weren't many that would do that, I've only seen a few, but most of them drank this vile bootleg liquor that looked and tasted as if it had fusel oil on top and they'd throw up. The country club would just be lined with the aristocracy of Birmingham throwing up over the balustrade because they had drunk this horrible liquor. So, there was no temptation for young ladies to take a drink because it tasted so bad. But it was very disappointing to want to be the figure of romance and have your beau turn into a sick young man vomiting and couldn't bring you home and somebody would have to bring you home.
But anyway, that summer, after Sister got married, I had gone to the
Cathedral School and came back that summer and I was just dying to go to
college. I had passed most of my college boards. I think that I had to
take Latin again, never was very good in Latin and although I had a
splendid teacher that year, Miss Webster, who was really wonderful and I
did get interested in Latin at that point, because she used Latin as a
sort of a
Now, what about your brother? Was he off?
Well, my brother was in the war, too. He was a naval aviator and he came back and he went up to Kentucky and worked in the coal mines. They were the Laniers, neighbors and friends of ours who owned them. He was going up to Kentucky and learn to . . . .
He was going to be a coal operator.
Yes, a coal operator, not a coal miner but he first had to learn
She was a sophomore at Wellesley.
Yes, at Wellesley. She was one of the reasons that I wanted to go so much because I was very devoted to her at the time.
Now, was this 1921?
This was 1921, because I was in the class of 1925. Let's see, 20-21 . . . maybe it was the fall of '21.
No, it would have been '21.
The fall of '21, that's right. Well, anyway, I went on up there and I got to Wellesley and I roomed in the Village. You don't know Wellesley, but the freshmen at that time all lived in the Village and the upperclassmen lived on the campus. So, I got to this sort of old fashioned wooden house and found that I had a room on the second floor and this old lady ran it, I forget her name now, but she was a mean old lady. So, I found this beautiful girl sitting on the other bed, it was a double room. Her name was Emmy Bosley and she was from Buffalo. She really was one of the prettiest girls that I ever saw in my life, I haven't seen her for years. She had big brown eyes and brown hair and her skin was sort of clear brown, if you know what I mean. She was very lively and vivacious and terribly attractive. We just adored each other. It was just a mutual meeting of the souls, we just adored each other. It couldn't have been a happier combination. Are you interested in hearing all these details?
Yes.
I'm not boring you to death?
Is this history you are getting down or sociology or what?
It doesn't matter.
Well, she had come from Buffalo and her father was a lawyer. But they
weren't very rich, they were like me, they went with all the rich people
and the nicest girls and were part of the society group, but her father
was not very wealthy, so they were always having to worry about money,
too. And her sister was a sophomore and she was a beautiful girl,
extremely blond. Emmy was a beautiful brunette and Kay was a beautiful
blonde, had beautiful blue eyes and blonde hair. She was kind of like my
sister and Emmy's relationship
Did you feel a lot freer there?
Oh my God, yes. I felt completely free and the thing that was so
wonderful . . . in Birmingham, the mothers at the country club would all
watch from the back porch. They had big french windows from the ball
room to the back porch. So, your mother was always watching to see how
many breaks you got and how popular you were and all the other mothers.
You know, that was pretty hard. You were watched all the time and if a
girl danced too close to a man or a man danced too close to a girl or
they saw any kind of hankey-pankey going on, don't think that they
didn't come right in and make a scene about it! Oh, no, we were just
watched constantly. It wasn't that our mothers thought that we were
going to do anything immoral or have a baby or anything, they wanted to
see how popular we were. It was like a race, a horse race or something,
whether your daughter was coming out ahead and who danced with her.
Everybody was involved in it. This was a serious business of life. This
wasn't anything frivilous, this was a serious business for the mother to
get the daughter married well and for the daughter to marry well. Now,
by marrying well, they meant a boy who was white, a Presbyterian or
Episcopalian, well off, came from a good family, could be placed and who
would
He wasn't pleased that you liked his books?
Well, he may have been pleased that I liked his books, but he really wanted me to be like my sister. He didn't think I was so sweet. And I argued with him, he irritated me, too. We would have terrible arguments about things and he would make Mother cry quite often and I didn't like that. I adored my mother.
Daddy was either very up or down, Mother used to say it was like riding
the elevator. He was always very enthusaistic or busy with something,
But whether up or down, he was always articulate.
Always articulate and then if he was down, he was the downest you can imagine.
Everybody else had to be down with him.
Oh, he would say he was a failure and make everybody perfectly miserable
and he would just pour out his frustrations and his grief and his
disappointments, just drown Mother and all of us in them when he was
down. You see, he was such a contradictory man because he was highly
educated and he was terribly interested in things, he would read the
paper from cover to cover and he was very interested in foreign affairs
and interested in what was going on in Washington, he had a really
bright mind and read everything in the world. He always waked up about
three o'clock and read to about five o'clock. He read a great deal and
kept up with things. He took The Literary Digest and
he read it from cover to cover, that was kind of the intellectual
journal of the day. But at the same time, you see, he was so full of
these total contradictions about race and class and women, you know what
I mean. So, his mind and his emotions were so totally at variance. Does
that make any sense to you at all?
Yes.
Then, he felt so guilty. You can't imagine how guilty he felt because he wasn't making money and wasn't rich. He felt such a failure. You see, in those days, if a man didn't make money and couldn't support his family in the right style, he was a terrible failure.
How about his brothers in Union Springs?
Well, his brothers had done better, you see. His brother Robert, his
oldest brother was judge in St. Louis, he made a lot of money in rice
and one of his sons got to be head of the Arkansas Power and Light
Company
I think that he was in the Federal Reserve System and pretty high up in it, I can't quite remember.
So, he did better than Daddy, too, as far as making money was concerned.
So, Daddy really had this awful feeling of failure, you see. It was the
same thing about being run out of the church, he took a stand for the
truth there, he refused to lie and to be a hypocrite and he really did a
very noble act by saying that he did not believe that the whale
swallowed Jonah. At the same time, the consequences of it, having to go
to work selling insurance, just nearly killed him. He thought that it
was the most degrading thing to have to go around asking poor white
people or blacks or just people to buy insurance from him. He just hated
it. He did it, but he didn't like it. He wasn't a good business man, he
was always trying to get rich by investing in real estate and of course,
Birmingham had booms and busts, you see. A lot of the real estate, if
you could have held on to it, he might have been a rich man, but he was
very . . . if Mother wanted a big house or a Packard automobile, he got
her one whether he had to borrow money for it or borrow on the real
estate or the farms or the plantation. Then, he sent me off to Wellesley
and he couldn't afford to do that, I'm sure, but he did it. So, he was
always doing more than he could afford to do. He just couldn't admit to
Mother that he was broke, that he was getting so poor. She knew it, but
she couldn't accept it either, really. She would find the bills, she
would hide them. Mother would hide bills, stick them behind the cushions
of the sofa or the pictures on the wall; she couldn't bear herself to
give him the bills, until they started calling up over the telephone.
It's kind of like Mr. McCawber in a David Copperfield? Well, anyway, there was always this feeling
of the debts never being quite paid, but in any case, they did send me
off to Wellesley. You see, I was conscious of all this at the time and
it made me somewhat unhappy, but at the same time, I was like most young
people, I was only eighteen and I was absorbed with myself.
Then, at Wellesley I really began to bloom as far as boys were concerned,
because the first month that I was there, I was invited to the Southern
Club. There was a lady in Cambridge named Mrs. Gay, who had several
daughters who they called the Gay girls. Now, you've got to understand
that "gay" then didn't mean what it does today, these were very nice
young southern girls and the lady was a very nice southern lady. But you
see, she was indigent too, and she kept up
All southern?
All southern. It was the Southern Club. So, there was a girl at the
Cathedral School named Sarah Orme from Atlanta. She's now married to
Billy Huger. Well, she was one of the greatest southern belles. I forgot
to mention Sarah. She was the prominent one. She
I am.
Well, you see, the girls today have no idea of how all the
Well, in any case, to get to Wellesley, to get from Wellesley to a dance,
and of course, you could only go on a Saturday night, you couldn't go on
a week night, you couldn't go on Friday night. You could go into town on
Saturday night and stay overnight, maybe you could go Friday night if
you went off for the weekend, but you only had one weekend during the
term or something, but there were certain guarranteed houses where you
could stay in Boston or Cambridge . . . well, Boston, this was on
Commonwealth Avenue and the lady that ran the house was
Now, the Southern Club was in Boston?
It was in Cambridge. You had to go over to Cambridge for the dances, which would usually be at Brattle Hall, which was kind of an assembly room or something on Brattle Street. And so, at the South Station you . . . have you ever been to Boston?
Yes.
Well, everybody would come into the South Station, it was a great big old gloomy place and I just adored it, it smelled so good and I loved it, it always meant for me romance and fun and thrills and so on. Then, you would go over, I don't think that we ever ate supper, if I can remember, we were so excited. So, we would get all dressed up, you know and everybody would fix everbody's hair and powder their backs and then we would come down and meet the young men. Well, here the three were. There was Bill Sibley, who was very tall and very handsome and he was the son of a federal judge and he was crazy about Sarah Orme. He was a suitor, he was just wild about Sarah.
But he was there to date someone else?
Yeah, he dated Emmy, I believe, I forget. I dated Clark Foreman,
You might tell how he . . . .
Oh, that's another long story.
Now, you and Clark were friends? You went with Clark a lot?
Oh, I went with Clark. We were great friends. And Bill Sibley and I were
great friends. They took me out a lot. You see, they were in love with
Sarah, at least Bill was and Clark began to be as good a friend of mine
as he was of Sarah's, because Clark was a friend. They introduced us to
everybody and we got launched, if you know what I mean, on
Now, was he from . . . .
He was from Virginia. But he went to Harvard Law School. He had been to
VMI and was first captain at VMI, which meant a great deal in that day
and age to this college group. He had been first captain at VMI, that
was something wonderful. And then he took me home to his family's house
and they had this huge mansion on the Hudson River and raised horses and
cows and his father was a contractor and built things like dams and
resevoirs. He built the resevoir for New York City. I had gone to school
with his sister, I forgot that. Her name was Jacquelyn Winston and she
had been at the National Cathedral School with me. She was younger than
I was, and we were great
Anyway, I went back to Wellesley for my sophomore year and this is the
first time anything happened to me to change me at all. You see, I had
been surrounded by southern boys, going to the Southern Club dances and
in college, there were no Negro girls where I lived and no Negro girls
where I ate and so when I went up on campus, for the first time, I came
in contact with a Negro girl, who was living in the same house. My
roommate and I had a beautiful room. Wellesley had sort of a roulette,
you pulled a number and we got a low number and we got this beautiful
set of rooms with a study and
Was she the only Negro woman at Wellesley?
Oh no. There were a number of them. I don't know how many
How did the other southern girls respond?
Well, they never said. I remember that it was something . . . I think that we were all a little bit ashamed of breaking the southern taboos and yet we didn't want to leave Wellesley. Again, it was never discussed.
So, you didn't talk about this with your beaus or with Clark Foreman?
No, I was sort of ashamed of it, really. I mean, I was in conflict about it, I didn't know whether I had acted right or wrong, whether I should have stood by southern tradition and gone home. I knew that I had stayed because I didn't want to miss all the good time I was having. No, I didn't discuss it. I remember only one other incident. In the spring . . . Wellesley is on a big lake and I remember that we were all swimming and there was a black girl swimming and I remember that this other southern girl got up by me on the dock and said, "My God, I never thought that I would be swimming with black people." She had evidently accepted the fact that she could eat with them, but not swim with them. But you see, I think that all of us were kind of the same way that I was, a little bit in conflict and we didn't want to repudiate our southern traditions and we didn't want to leave Wellesley, particularly Harvard and Cambridge either. So, we never discussed it. That was one of the things at that time, you didn't discuss things. There was none of all of this soul searching done and you were supposed to have a certain set of values and you just lived by them.
Well, was your attitude to kind of ignore the black woman or did you become friends with her or . . . .
Oh, I didn't become friends with her, but I was pleasant, I was polite. But the thing was that there were not only a number of Negro girls in the college, but there were Chinese and Indian girls, too and I had to get used to that too. And of course, one of the Chinese girls was named Lillian Chen, I believe and she was one of the famous Chen family of China, immensely rich with jewels and she was a rather special kind of a girl because she was so rich and had just such beautiful jewels. She would wear these beautiful embroidered brocades and the Indian girls would wear these beautiful embroidered saris and they had jewels. They must have been awfully rich girls. But I never made any friends with them either. We were all polite and pleasant, but I never made friends. My friends were the southern girls and my roommate and her sister.
But that winter, through my roommate, she was invited up to a dance at
some school, by some friend from Buffalo . . . I think it was at Exeter.
And she took me along as an extra. At that school, I met a boy named
Corliss Lamont. Now, he was at Harvard but he had gone to Exeter . . . I
think it was Exeter, mybe it was Andover. Anyway, I met him and he was a
wonderful dancer. Now, this boy that I was crazy about at the time,
named Bill Winston, wasn't such a good dancer, it was just that he was
so handsome. See, I really wasn't engaged to him, I was just dating him
and had this romantic feeling toward him. It hadn't come at that point
to anything, really an affair of any kind. I never kissed him, Oh, my
God, no.
But you would kiss Carlton Wright during the summer?
Oh yeah, I had just gotten used to that, I reckon.
[END OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE B]
Anyway, Corliss Lamont was a marvelous dancer and so he drove us back to
Wellesley and he became a beau of mine, he began coming up. I never any
more heard of the Lamonts than the man in the moon. I didn't know who he
was and he had a kind of a thin overcoat and a raggedy collar and the
rich boys in those days, you see, had these big old coonskin coats and
great big red Stuz automobiles. He didn't have anything like that at all
and I thought that he was just a poor boy. When we would go out, I would
always look on the right side and take the 50¢ lunch and 35¢ drink or
something that was cheap, because I thought that the poor boy was just a
poor Harvard student, you know, and barely getting along. So, one night,
he called me up and said that he had two friends that he wanted to bring
out and would I get Emmy and Kay Bosley to go along on this date. So, he
came out with these boys named Rockefeller and Vanderbilt. Well, of
course, we thought that it was a huge joke, we didn't believe a minute
that they were. We thought that they were playing a joke on us. So, we
called Mr. Rockefeller "Mr. Rockebilt" and Mr. Vanderbilt "Mr.
Vanderfeller."
And you didn't go to the Southern Club with him?
No, no, I'd just go out with him. He did take me out on the lake one time
and he made some advances toward me, but with the canoe, we were so
afraid that we were going to fall that we couldn't do much courting.
That was one reason that I think that they had canoes on the
But not only was it that, and now, this is something that I hope Cliff
can listen to without getting mad, but I first realized that women could
be something. This was also a great liberation, the real liberation that
I got at Wellesley, when I realized that you didn't have to marry to be
somebody. You see, I had
But let me tell you how they taught sex at Wellesley. This is another
thing that makes you realize how these inhibitions extended everywhere.
When we were freshmen, we had about four hundred girls in the class and
my roommate and I, now, she was extremely popular, but she was just as
innocent as I was. She didn't know anything about sex. And she came from
Buffalo. Now, she had kissed a few more boys than I had and so, she
regarded herself as far more experienced, but she didn't know anything
about sex either. She was just as ignorant as I was. So, they had a
course for freshmen students and it was supposed to be preparation for
marriage, as they called it. So, all the freshman class went to the
chapel and we looked at a movie for several
You really did not know how the baby got there?
I swear to God and nobody will believe me to this day, but we didn't. I
was
I thought that you knew but you just didn't discuss it.
No, no. I didn't know.
She was a city gal and wasn't raised on the farm and had no idea . . . .
Tell her what you said about the rooster and the hen.
I was just confirming her innocence. We had been married several years
and we would occasionally drive down to Montgomery for weekends and we
didn't have the super highways then, and we would drive through these
country farms and there were the chickens and cows and so on around. So,
Virginia made the comment to me, "Why do the roosters treat these hens
so bad, jumping on top of them and trying to pull their combs out, why
are they so cruel to the hens?"
Well, I know that I was as stupid as I could be, but you see, I was frightened, you see, I had these inhibitions built up in me.
Well, going back, I think that some of them said that it was the apple blossoms, didn't they?
Oh well yes, I think that one girl thought that it might be the apple
blossoms, but we laughed at that, we knew that was silly. But
Well, she thought so, because when I was dating Virginia and we had a football game in Montgomery, so I drove her down to Montgomery and we stayed with Mother and Father and I had been trying to work myself up to proposing for some time. She was babysitting with the Black children . . .
Hugo and Sister's two boys.
Hugo and Sister, they were out of town. So, the youngest one was then about eight months old and so, I had rehearsed this thing, I was working up to it and so, Virginia was getting rather interested. And all at once in the kitchen, there was the damnedest explosion you ever saw. We rushed into the kitchen and here was milk dripping down from the ceiling, Virginia was warming milk and she put the stopper in the bottle and it had exploded. Well, that set me back for two or three months.
No, six weeks, I think.
Was that all? So, I decided that this might be the occasion and I got
Father's car and drove Virginia around. I wanted to find a nice place on
the side of the road to park, but then I realized that the Ku Klux Klan
had taken over the job of policing the highways and they were going to
stop this "necking." I thought that it would be very embarrasing after
the bottle exploded on me if I got just in the middle
The Ku Klux was riding around all the country roads then and if anybody was parked . . . .
They were very concerned with the morals of the young people. So,
finally, I drove on back into Father's garage and I kissed her. I didn't
say anything about marriage that night, but the next day, we were
driving back to Birmingham and Virginia was very concerned and wanted to
know if I was really going to marry her and she didn't know what the
consequences of this kissing would be.
Well, I won't say that . . . you see, the great ideal was to be chaste and be absolutely pure, but also be so attractive that you were also always being chased by the boys. It was kind of a difficult combination, as you can imaging, but still, that was the ideal. Well, anyway, I got relieved of the kissing, I knew that if I kissed, I wouldn't have a baby, that was a big relief.
If you stopped at that.
If I stopped at that. Well, of course, I didn't know whatever else could
happen. Well anyway, this was so typical of Wellesley, you see. Here
were these lectures being given on preparation for marriage and how to
conduct yourself properly, which was strictly traditional, but also I
took zoology and we started out with having to match crayfish, breed
crayfish and stick one with another so that they would breed. Well, they
did, you know. Gone With The Wind, of just forgetting about it, we just
pushed it aside. We didn't really believe it or something. I can
remember the absolute horror of that awful series of bottles on that
shelf with that little fetus finally getting to be a baby and instead of
wanting to make you a mother or making you think how wonderful it would
be to have a baby,
You just didn't discuss it.
No, we didn't discuss things like that. Sex was something that you just
didn't talk about. You could talk about romance and beaus and lovers and
sweethearts, but sex, no. Then, I'm sure that the southern girls had
some feeling like I did that it was something connected with black women
and black people, it happened in the basement and was dirty and ugly and
smelled bad, with a man leaving in the middle of the night or early in
the morning and Mother getting upset and saying, "She's had a man down
there all night." Something was ugly and disgusting about it. Well, in
any case, the next thing that happened to me at Wellesley was really a
good thing, was one, I learned that women could be happy without getting
married and they could use their minds and accomplish things. They could
be really great teachers and could accomplish a great deal. Then, the
next thing was that I had a marvelous teacher named Muzzey who was the
professor of economics and I took a course in economics and he was a
perfectly marvelous teacher. He was a socialist, he was a Fabian, this
was 1920, '22. Anyway, the Russian Revolution had taken place, but I
never even heard about that. I mean, it was just something so far
It was less than that at that time.
Well, anyway, they made just so much money. "So, now tell me how Mrs.
Smith with three children is going to arrange her budget so that she can
live." Well of course, I tried to do it and you had to look up the price
of food and rent and doctors and it was a real active lesson in
economics. Of course, I soon came to the realization that Mrs. Smith
couldn't possibly live on that amount of money. You just couldn't do it.
So, I remember that I wrote my paper and I wrote and gave all the
figures that I looked up and then I wrote at the end, "Now, I've come to
the conclusion that Mrs. Smith's husband doesn't get enough money
because they can't possibly live on what he is paid as a steelworker in
Birmingham, Alabama." Not that I had ever been in a steel mill or knew
anything about it, but he gave me an A, because he said that I had
finally realized that people can't live on what they are paid. So, that
was a great breakthrough. But still, all these things had a delayed
effect, but the main thing that
The boll weevil ate up her education.
Yes. Well, I had an English teacher and she thought that I had some talent in writing and she was a lovely woman too and I can't remember her name. If I could ever get a catalog of that place, maybe I could remember these people's names. But she came to me and said, "Now Virginia, . . . " Oh, I had another great experience, too. That was the Bible being taught as history. You had to take Bible at Wellesley and it was taught as history. So, I knew that my father was right. That was a great breakthrough.
That was a vindication.
That was a vindication and a great breakthrough because the Bible was taught as history of the Jews and all and that was a tremendous thing. You can't imagine what that meant to me. I was always uneasy that my father had been thrown out of the church for being a heretic and it was an idea that I didn't want to think about, but at this time, I realized that he was right and I could be comfortable about that. That was a great relief, too. I could be comfortable about the Bible and I could be comfortable that you could make a living and you could be happy if you didn't get a husband. There was sex and economics and religion, I did begin to realize that people had a hard time living and didn't get paid enough. I began to get some inkling of economics.
Did you make any connection between Mrs. Smith and her not
No, none whatever, not at that point.
Just the fact that she couldn't . . . .
That she couldn't live on what she was getting. So, sex, there was a
tremendous breakthrough on that, although it is hard to realize, and I
began to kiss Bill Winston then and enjoyed that thoroughly.
Well, that was more dangerous than a hammock.
Well, he never got inside the cape, he just wrapped me in it. So, I was liberated to a degree, you see, there was sex, religion, economics and . . . what else. Well, there were those three things particularly and particularly about women, the fact that women could do something and women could achieve. So, my English teacher said, "Now Virginia, I think that you have a certain talent in writing and if will you be willing to come back next year and work in the Self-Help House . . . " you see, Wellesley had a self-help house which meant that the girls did all the work, did the cooking and the cleaning up and everything for themselves and they paid practically nothing, a very little amount . . . "I think that I can arrange for you to get a scholarship." So, I was thrilled, I was dying to come back to Wellesley, but I wrote my father and mother this. And oh, my father! The idea of my going into the Self-Help House! You see, Daddy felt that he was a failure financially and for me to go into the self-help house proved that he was a failure.
But you weren't at all offended by this?
No, I was thrilled. I would have adored to come back to Wellesley and I longed to come back. You see, I was in love with Bill Winston, I thought, and I . . . .
And it wouldn't have damaged your status with your friends to have come back and . . . .
Oh, not at all, I think, but it damaged my father's pride, you see. He just laid down the law on that, no indeed, no daughter of his was going to go to Wellesley and go into the Self-Help House. That was just impossible, to do the cooking and the cleaning and washing up and so on, oh no. I don't think that he even wanted to take the scholarship if I had gotten it. You see, it was that southern pride and the fear of being a failure, of being considered a failure. So, I just realized that when I left, I couldn't come back. I didn't see any way to come back at all.
So, when I came back home, the first thing that I got ready to do was to make my debut. I had to make my debut. That was '23. So, all that summer, the great discussion was about making my debut. I did and I had all kinds of fall dresses and I was introduced by the Redstone Club and . . . .
I don't think that it was the Redstone Club, I think that came on a little later.
Oh, I was introduced and I went to party, party, party, you know. We would have luncheons and teas, we were the debutantes and everybody was watching you. You were dressed up all the time and going to parties all the time and dances all the time. Then I visited my aunt over in Memphis and I went to lots of parties over there. Well, I had a horrible experience in Memphis. Shall I tell her about being held up by the black boys?
Yes, I think that's . . . .
That was a really frightening experience. As I say, the Depression hit
the South very much sooner than it hit other places, particularly in
cotton. So, I went over to visit my aunt, the same aunt in Memphis that
I adored so, Aunt Louise. I went to millions of parties over there and I
met
Now, did you go back to Wellesley that fall?
No.
You did not go back, ever, to Wellesley?
Well, I went back on a visit.
She went back to visit the . . . .
Oh yes, the following year, I went back to visit but I never went back. We didn't have any money. But that year, I made my debut and then I went over to visit my aunt, but this is just an example. Handy, the famous Handy band . . . what was his name?
W.C. Handy.
W.C. Handy, you see, he was playing on Beale Street then, in what they
called The Two Bit Bands. The boys would all get together and put in two
bits and then they would go down to Beale Street and get a band to come
He was still cheap, because he played for a dance at the University of Alabama and . . . .
Oh, that was the most marvelous music that you can imagine.
. . . . and it was quite a bargain.
Oh, you just can't imagine, the St. Louis Blues and the
Beale Street Blues and oh, to dance to Handy's
band was one of the most marvelous things in the world. But then they
had what they called Two Bit Bands. The boys would put in two bits,
which was a quarter, and they would hire a band off of Beale Street,
which was then sort of the center of jazz. Of course, New Orleans was
too and then they would play and you would have a wonderful dance. So, I
just danced, danced, danced. That was my great thing, I could dance by
that time quite well. And you see, being nearsighted didn't make any
difference in dancing and swimming. I couldn't play tennis or golf or
anything because I couldn't see, but I could dance and swim. But this
young fellow took me out after one of the dances to this road right near
the country club that they called the Lover's Lane or something. By that
time, I had gotten used to all the boys wanting to kiss you. This was a
game they played and it didn't mean a damn thing, of course, they just
wanted to see if they could, I reckon. Anyway, we were having the usual
argument about whether to kiss or not to kiss and did I kiss or didn't I
kiss . . . the thing that is so funny about this is that this was the
Jazz Age, which was supposed to have been such a terrifically gay,
drunken, sex age. Well, it really wasn't. I mean, there were some people
that might have engaged in all that, but the nice girls didn't. I don't
bet that Zelda Sayre . . . I bet that kissing was the limit that she
went to, in spite of what they
I would be willing to bet that Zelda had never had an affair with any man until she and Scott got married. She always did things to shock people, but that was it.
She used to come up to the dances in Birmingham and she was just
gorgeous. She had sort of a golden glow around her and when she would
come into a ball room, all the other girls would want to go home because
they knew that the boys were going to be concentrating on her. They
would line up the whole length of the ball room to dance with her for
one minute. She was just pre-eminent. And we recognized it, we just knew
that when she came around we might as well go home, because as far as we
were concerned, we had had it. But anyway, Jim Rainer and I stopped and
all of a sudden, on either side of the car were these two black fellows.
One of them with a pistol and one of them with a knife. And they said to
this Jim Rainer, "Get out of that car, or we'll cut your heart out, and
give us what you've got." You see, he had this plantation in Mississippi
and was used to the blacks. So, he got out and stayed very cool and
said, "Okay, I'll give you all I've got, I'll bet that you are on your
way to Chicago." They said, "We are." He said, "Well, I'm sorry that we
don't have anything for you in Mississippi." They were all leaving
Mississippi then, a lot of them were going north. He talked with them
and kind of joked with them and laughed and gave them the money that he
had in his pocket and they went on off. Of course, it scared the hell
out of me. I was just terrified. So, of course, I kissed him in
gratitude then! I didn't have any debate about that. So, he took me home
and he told me, "Please don't tell your aunt, because I will be blamed
for it, I'll be in a lot of trouble. So please don't tell your aunt."
Honestly, I read the paper the
That was something new, too. Anyway, I came on back home and I had a good time, I forget the boys' names. I know that they all came around and some of them I can remember.
Now, did you come back and get a job? Is that when you went to work?
No, no. That was the next year. I just spent that whole year making a debut, going to parties and having dates and going to dances and visiting my aunt. I went up to Knoxville and visited a friend of my mother's and that was more dances and more dates.
All this wasn't as expensive as going to school would have been?
Well, it may have been, but at least Mother thought that it may have been
leading to something more profitable, I don't know. But it wasn't very
expensive. You see, the rich girls had big rich balls that cost hundreds
of dollars, but I never had any like that. I think that Mother had maybe
a buffet supper for me, but that was all. We couldn't afford any big
parties. The only funny instance that happened that year that I can
remember so well, I had a dear friend named Tinsley Harrison who was a
perfectly brilliant boy. He was from Birmingham and he had been at the
Peter Bent Brigham Hospital as an intern. He graduated from high school
when he was fourteen
You weren't angry with him?
No, I wasn't angry with him. I was shocked, but I did think it was funny.
The point was that he was the only one that I ever went with that wasn't
fooled by all this southern sweet talk. He was smart enough to
[END OF TAPE 4, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 4, SIDE B]
still in Alabama, but I think that he objects to my political opinions.
Was he in Birmingham?
Yes. He says that he doesn't remember this, that it never happened.
Well, I thought that he did, but . . . .
Yeah, well he says that it didn't happen the way I said it did or something.
But when we first came back to Montgomery, Virginia had some trouble and she went up to Birmingham to have an operation and Tinsley was in the this hospital as a heart man and . . . .
Oh, he was a big shot in the hospital.
Tinsley was a big shot there. We were flat broke and didn't know how we were going to pay for all this. They had the room ready, a very lovely room and you never saw anybody get as much attention. So, Virginia was finally leaving and we were going to get the bad news about how much it was going to be and I was trying to figure what I could hock and they said, "Well, Dr. Harrison has taken care of everything." He said, "Well, I think that I owed you that."
Yes, he did admit that, but then I saw him a year or so ago and he came out here and he said that he doesn't really believe that he went to the length that he did go, but he did, he used me as a . . . .
Is he still married to his wife?
Oh, yes, he's got five or six children now. He really though, has become
extremely conservative. He never was any liberal or radical, but
So, you spent most of that year partying and didn't work?
No, I was debutanting and I did have one or two proposals but nothing
that appealed to me or amounted to anything. So the next year, we really
were
Her Daddy told her she was destroying his credit at the bank.
Oh yeah, Daddy said, "Well, you realize that with a daughter working
downtown, my credit is destroyed, my credit at the bank is completely
destroyed." So, it really was tough, I mean it was hard. I did fix the
plumbing and the furnace and the roof, but you see, by that time cotton
was down to nothing and Daddy was beginning to sell off what he could, I
suppose.
Yes, I thought that with my normal salary combined with hers, we could immediately get married and then she immediately quit.
Now, you met Cliff while you were at the library?
I met Cliff at the library . . . .
You met me first at church.
I met him first at church. You see, I won't go into the various gentlemen
that offered themselves . . .
Yeah, we'd stick our head in the door and yell Dr. Foster went to
Gloster."
Yeah, Daddy was lively.
So, I met him in church, this was Dr. Edmonds' church. By that time, they
had joined the northern Presbyterian church, the independent
Presybterian church and I taught Sunday School, too. So, I also sang in
the choir. I couldn't sing much, but I loved singing. I was in the
Wellesley Glee Club and I loved to sing, but I never was a very good
singer. But in any case, I met Cliff at church. This young man had been
trying to marry me and I finally told him that I wasn't and said for him
not to come around any more and that was the end of that. So, my
They were charging her off, she was an old maid and they had given up on her. She was twenty-two years old and . . . .
I wasn't twenty-two until I married, I was twenty-one then.
Well, they had given up on you.
Or twenty, I can't remember. Anyway, my brother said to me, "Look, nobody would ever suit you. Everybody that comes around, there is something wrong with them. You'll never get married. Nobody suits you, you are just always critical of everybody." Daddy said, "Well, what do you expect, who are you looking for?" Mother was always trying to protect me and she said, "Now, Virginia doesn't want to marry somebody that she's not in love with, you know." So, my brother said to me, "Have you ever seen anybody, any human being that you were in love with, that you wanted to marry? Have you ever even seen anybody that you could think of marrying?" Of course, there was Carlton Wright, whom I still adored, but he was so young and had no money and was impossible from the husband point of view and it was just beautiful and romantic. Then, there was Bill Winston who was certainly eligible in every way, but then he jilted me and then committed suicide. So, I thought real hard and I said, "Well, I'll tell you. I met a young man in church last Sunday and I think that he is the handsomest young man that I have ever seen, or one of them." I really thought that he was handsomer than Bill Winston. And my brother said, "What's his name?" Daddy spoke up then and said, "Oh, that's John W. Durr's son. His name is Clifford Durr." And Brother said, "Oh, my Lord, that's who you want? That's easy, I'll get him around for dinner next Sunday."
You were being set up.
You see, they had been fraternity brothers at the University.
I had never met Virginia.
Well, you met me at church.
I mean, not before I moved to Birmingham.
So, tell her what you thought about me.
Well, I thought that your dress was too short and you had on your glasses and you looked like a typical Sunday School teacher and I . . . .
He didn't find me very attractive, I don't think. Well anyway, the next Sunday, they invited him to dinner and he came. And Mother, oh my Lord, she got the damask table cloth fixed up and the damask napkins and we had a delicious dinner and the cook was there and they were serving and then she bought this marvelous cake. There was a lady in Birmingham then that charged five dollars for cakes and they were perfectly beautiful and this was a lemon meringue cake about this high with white icing and lemon meringue inbetween. So, when the cake came in, Mother didn't say that I made it, what did she say?
She said, "Well Virginia, this is certainly delicious cake."
Of course, he assumed that I had made the cake.
Now, to be fair to your mother, she never did say you made it.
She didn't say that, but of course, he assumed that I had. But the thing was that after dinner was over, Mother went to take a nap. Brother and Daddy went out to play golf at the country club and I was left with Cliff. My opportunity. So, we got in the old Studebaker that we had, it was my father's car, Cliff didn't have a car and we promptly ran out of gas.
We ran out before it ever really started. But fortunately, the car was parked on a hill, they lived on a high hill, and you could coast five or six blocks down the hill to a filling station. I used that car, Dr. Foster's car, all the time that I was courting, but I never got in it that it wasn't out of gas and I would have to fill it up.
Well, I don't know why you didn't know then that you were marrying a pauper or somebody that didn't have any money. Well anyway, we started going together, but the thing was that he came up to the library . . . tell them about that, because this was the thing that really made me . . . .
Well, I asked her for a certain book and she asked me what the problem
was and I remember it was something on municipal law. She not only went
and got the book but began to look up the law for me and I was very much
impressed. She never would do that after she was my legal secretary.
That was it and that was that summer and then in the fall, he took me down to his family. We went together for quite awhile and that fall he took me down to his mother's and that's when we got engaged. And tell her what the old Negro man said.
Oh yes, one reason that I got engaged was because this old Negro man,
George Washington Daniels, he sort of took up with Mother like a stray
dog and she fed him. He never would do any work, but he was a
personality. So, I think that we had been to a party or something and
Virginia was resting and we were out in the yard and he came up to me
and said, "You say her name is Miss Foster?" I said, "Yes." He said, "Is
she one of them Fosters from over there at Union Springs?" I said, "Yes,
her
But he didn't do it. Anyway, we got married in April and I worked up until the time that I got married and they asked us to be the first people married in the new church. You see, the independent Presybterian church and so, we were married on Easter Monday and the whole church was full of lillies.
Well you see, the preacher had been Dr. Edmonds, he had been kicked out of the same church that Dr. Foster had. But he had a church in Montgomery. He came right from the seminary to the First Presbyterian Church there.
He was a great friend of your family's.
And a great friend of the family's and that continued and of course, he had suffered the same fate as Dr. Foster, but he was young and very attractive and when they kicked him out, about 75 percent of the congregation went with him. Well, they moved over to the synagogue just across the corner and then they got busy and started building the church. We were the . . . because of Dr. Foster and Dr. Edmonds and the family connection and all, they asked us to be the first married in it. We had to postpone the wedding. I wanted to go ahead and get it over with, but then I would have to go up and ask the contractor, "When please, could I get married?" Finally, it was dedicated on Easter Sunday and . . . .
We were engaged in the fall and planned to be married in the spring, but
in the meantime, I realized that when I married Cliff, I was marrying
somebody different from anybody I had ever known, someone
Well, if the showdown came, I liked you better than Shiloh.
So in any case, my father, I don't know what he did then, I think that he probably sold the last piece of the plantation or something, but I had the biggest wedding that you have ever known in your life. I had it in the new church and the Easter lillies were everywhere. Of course, the church had paid for those. I think I had eight bridesmaids . . . .
They left the Easter decorations there.
We had 1500 invitations and 500 at the reception and I am sure that it cost my father lots of money that he didn't have, but it was really . . . and my mother was just triumphant. Here was a daughter who had married well.
Josephine had the small family wedding and every mother has got to have at least one big wedding.
And while they were devoted to Hugo, and Hugo was running for the Senate at this time, this was in '26, we were married in April of '26 and Hugo was at that time running for the Senate and it was a very bitter campaign. He was running against Kilby and Bankhead and Musgrove and it was a very bitter campaign indeed.
And Judge Mayfield.
Judge Mayfield.
Did he win that first time?
Yes. He won, but it was a very bitter campaign and he was off campaigning all the time. Sister was my maid of honor and I had a lot of bridesmaids. And another thing that I should realize about Cliff's practicality, too, because people gave brides parties before the wedding all the time, showers and luncheons and teas and buffet suppers. So, I had quite a few parties given to me. What did he do? He went and had his wisdom teeth pulled so that he couldn't go to the parties.
Well, that wasn't the reason that I did it, I had them and I knew that I
had to get them out and I wanted to be in good shape when I got married.
He couldn't go to any of the parties. His face was swelled out this way
and his jaw was all sore and swollen and little bits of teeth
We got married at eight and we were going to have the reception and then take the Pan American for New Orleans that night. I had left my good suit that I was going to change into, we were in full dress for the affair and I was going to change over there right after the reception and go on down to the train. But eight o'clock came and no preacher.
This is eight o'clock at night?
Yes.
And Lloyd Bowers was one of my groomsmen, he was very smooth and Mrs.
Foster was getting more and more nervous and he kept telling her that it
was only two minutes after eight and that it just seemed a long time.
And they had visions of Edmonds having run off the road, down the
mountain roads there. Finally, he showed up at eight thirty and was the
only calm person around the place. I was there in a side room, they left
me entirely with my brother, who was my best man. And I gave him the
fee, which was twenty-five dollars, for the preacher. That was a lot of
money back in those days and I thought that I was making a good capital
investment. So, we finally got through it and we rushed to the house for
the reception, which was quite an affair and then the time came when we
had to make the train. So I go up the stairs to change my clothes where
I had left them and my britches were gone. Well, I thought that some of
Well, we got on the train and we went down to Pass Christian and that was
a great place for honeymoons. There was a lovely sort of private hotel
on the Gulf and in April, it was just full of blossoms and beautiful
things and smelled so good and we had a lovely big room upstairs and we
were still rather strangers and particularly me. This was quite an
adjustment, getting used to having a man in the room with you. So, we
were still rather strangers and then a series of things happened to
bring us closer together.
American plan, one price.
So, Cliff always had a very good appetite and he thought that since he could eat it all at the same price, he would just eat it all. So, he started out with oysters and then he ate crab and then he ate clams and then he ate shrimp and then fish and he went right down the menu. The main thing was seafood down there. He ate it all and enjoyed it.
It was delicious, perfectly delicious.
Absolutely delicious. He ate everything, every variety of seafood that
was on the menu, each one of them was better than the other. So, the
next morning, I looked at my bridegroom and he was green. Just as green
as that sofa pillow there, just bright green. So I went rushing
downstairs, absolutely terrified, "My husband's turned green!"
It wasn't the teeth, it was the bone. They had fractured my jaw, it was the bone.
The bone would come up and he had to lie on the bed with his mouth wide open and I would have to pull out his bone. So, by the time we got home, we were really very friendly indeed. I got pregnant when?
We had our friends counting up, but there was a full month to spare.
A full month to spare. You see, I didn't know any more about birth control than a man in the moon. I didn't know anything and especially about birth control, so naturally, I got pregnant.
We weren't concerned with controlling it, we thought that it was the thing you did, you got married and had babies.
The thing was that I really thought I was the only human being in the world that had ever had a baby. I was so conceited and the bigger I got, the prouder I was. I had an old doctor and instead of saying, "You must diet and keep the baby small." He would say, "Oh Miss Virginia, you've got to eat for two now, so remember that you are eating for two." I was 120 pounds when I married and when the baby was born, I was 185 pounds. I was absolutely immense, I could hardly walk. But in those days, nobody . . .
Doctor Lupton was saying, "Nobody in the world is as healthy as a pregnant woman."
We were living with my mother and father, we had a room.
This is part of the myth. Of course, we wanted to
You were living with your mother and father?
This would bring in a little income.
Well, it brought in some income, but also, Mother didn't want me to leave. She was clinging on to me in those days. She realized that things were just going down the pot and she was holding on to me very hard. Mother didn't know what to do, you know, she just knew that we were owing everybody and that money was leaving and everything was lost. Of course, the big wedding had given her a lot of pleasure but then of course, it had to be paid for. The thing was that of that first year we were married, we were very happy and we had a room and bath and a big sitting room. We turned one of the rooms into a sitting room and we used to have people in and . . . .
We had a sort of a portable grill and could cook things.
Yes, we had a lot of things. The thing with having a baby in those days.
This is what shows you the difference. In the first place, of course,
the eating, the "eating for two." That's old fashioned and the gaining
of a tremendous amount of weight, they would think now that it was just
suicidal. To have a baby, well, you went to the doctor once every two or
three weeks and you were treated not as if you were having an illness
exactly, but everybody pampered you, you know. I was awfully sick at my
stomach for awhile and I was treated like the queen bee and I felt like
the queen bee. I felt like I was just doing something that nobody had
ever done before and it was just the most marvelous thing
The only harsh words that I ever received from my mother-in-law, she
didn't think I was excited enough when Virginia was in the delivery
room. She thought I was too calm and she got furious with me.
I came out and in about an hour, I was sitting up eating breakfast and was feeling wonderful. Here I was, a healthy young girl and I had a trained nurse, I stayed in the hospital about two weeks, didn't I?
I think you did and then the nurse . . . .
Then the nurse came home and stayed with me another two weeks. I wasn't
allowed to walk up and down the steps for two weeks. Here I was, a
healthy young girl, just as healthy as I could be, a healthy baby and
yet I was treated like a terrific invalid. I was made to feel that I had
done something just spectacular and this was just something that was
marvelous, this was the reward of all my life. The trained nurse was
there for one solid month. A trained, registered nurse. Of course, she
didn't get paid much in those days. Did you ever hear anything as
ridiculous in the days of your life? Now my daughters have
Well, now you have gotten through the marriage, so we will stop the tape.
This is the third session with Virginia Foster Durr, we are on tape number three. This is March 15, 1975.
So, I told you that I had my first child and Anne, that's my oldest daughter.
So we lived with Mother and Daddy for another year or two and then Cliff was getting awfully impatient to get to himself. He was making more money down at the law firm and had been made a member of the firm, but Mother and Daddy were just harder up than ever. But then Sister and Hugo came home and they were going to stay a year in Birmingham because he had to run for the Senate again in '32.
He had just completed his first term?
Just completed his first term. So what they did, they gave us a chance to
move and then they took over the house on Niazuma where Mother and Daddy
were. All of this had to be done with the greatest sort of lack of
conversation because both Daddy and Mother hated to admit that they were
just getting dead broke. So, it all had to be done as sort of a favor
that they were doing for Sister and Hugo to let them stay in their
house. Everything always had to be surrounded by all kinds of protection
to save their pride because they really both just had this terrible
feeling of failure and shame at losing everything that they had. In the
meantime, I had had an extremely bad miscarriage. The situation at home
worried me and I had had a very difficult miscarriage. I had had the flu
and then I had had the miscarriage shortly thereafter. But Cliff and I
were just delighted to get on our own and we bought a
Was this 1931 or '32?
Well, this was '31. You see, Hugo got elected in '32, so this was '31 really.
Then I had another terrible miscarriage and nearly died then. I had what
they called placenta previa and I nearly bled to death
and had a terrible time, but while I was in the hospital, soon
thereafter, I was very ill and had to have blood transfusions. I had a
nurse, Mrs. Van Markenstine, I believe her name was. She was a very
devout Catholic, you see, the big hospital then in Birmingham was St.
Vincent's Hospital, and she was married to some man and had I don't know
how many children, she was a Catholic and thought that birth control was
a sin. But her husband and she were sort of separated, they would come
back together, maybe he felt like they had too many children, anyway she
had an older son. And at that time, the dairies in Birmingham had a
terrible sort of price war and people couldn't buy milk and they were
losing money all the time and everybody was just engaged in this
cuthroat endeavor to