© This work is the property of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text.
MP3 file derived from WAV preservation master, which was derived from original analog cassettes.
The electronic edition is a part of the UNC-Chapel Hill digital library, Documenting the American South.
An audio file with the interview complements this electronic edition.
The text has been entered using double-keying and verified against the original.
The text has been encoded using the recommendations for Level 4 of the TEI in Libraries Guidelines.
Original grammar and spelling have been preserved.
All quotation marks, em dashes and ampersand have been transcribed as entity references.
All double right and left quotation marks are encoded as "
All em dashes are encoded as —
Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview K-0589, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Leslie Thorbs grew up in a family of tenant farmers during the 1920s and 1930s in eastern North Carolina. Thorbs begins the interview with his recollections of Kennedy Farm, where his family lived and worked as tenant farmers. Thorbs recalls some of the techniques used in the farming of tobacco, cotton, soy beans, and corn. He also describes in detail the impoverished conditions his family faced during the years of the Great Depression. Like many children of similar socioeconomic status during this time, Thorbs did not complete elementary school. Although he and his siblings had helped with farm work all along, he began to work for wages at the age of eight in order to supplement the family income. Later, he became a tenant farmer in his own right and worked in that capacity until the end of the 1940s. After that, he spent the rest of his working years as a janitor at Texfi Industries and as a factory worker at the Grifton Sewing Factory. Throughout the interview, Thorbs touches on race relations, focusing on what it was like for him as an African American to work with whites, and describing his reaction to his daughter's interracial marriage. In addition to describing work, farming, living conditions, and race relations, Thorbs spends considerable time discussing his wife and their family. He met his wife when he was a teenager. Unlike Thorbs, his wife, Hattie Mae, attended high school—Thorbs met her when she was finishing school. In 1941, they traveled to South Carolina to marry; because he was only seventeen and she was only fifteen, they could not be married in North Carolina. They settled in Grifton, North Carolina, where they raised their children. All but two of their six surviving children also settled in Grifton and, as a result, all were adversely affected by the horrendous flooding wrought by Hurricane Floyd in 1999. Thorbs describes the flood and its immediate aftermath, emphasizing the fact that he and his wife were lucky to escape with their lives. Their home, along with all of their possessions, was destroyed. Thorbs describes how the entire family stayed with his daughter in Kinston, North Carolina, until it was safe for them to return home. At the time of the interview, Thorbs was still living with one of his children, grieving the recent death of his wife and waiting for his home to be made habitable.
Leslie Thorbs describes growing up in a tenant farming family in eastern North Carolina, during the 1920s and 1930s. Thorbs describes his experiences with poverty, farming, factory work, race relations, and family life. He concludes the interview by discussing the devastating impact of Hurricane Floyd's flooding on his family and his community.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
You can keep
Well, my real name is Leslie Thorbs. I was born on the Kennedy farm in Lenoir County. That's up there—. You here talk of DuPont. Okay, that's where I was raised. I was raised and born up there on DuPont. That was my home.
Oh, the Kennedy farm?
Yeah. That was the name of the farm before DuPont got there, Kennedy farm. There were two brothers. Mr. Henry Kennedy's part, DuPont got that. Mr. Harmon's Kennedy's part is over on this side, and he didn't ever sell any of his. All it was Mr. Henry Kennedy's, that was Mr. Herman's brother, okay. Mr. Henry sold his parts out to DuPont.
So that's what it was before DuPont got there?
Yeah. That's what it was. Yeah, that's what it was before DuPont got there. When I moved from up there, I moved down here. We moved down here in '39, wait a minute, '38. Moved from out on the Kennedy farm to Grifton in 1938. I've been in here in Grifton ever since 1938 up until now.
So when you moved to Grifton in 1938, did you move to this street here?
No. When I was moved down here, we moved up we called it up near the Skeeter Pond Woods, up that a way. Anyhow you go up the road here and turn like you're going back out to Edison Bridge up there and just when you made it right onto that fork about, I guess it's about a good mile down there. That's where we moved to.
That was called Skeeter Pond?
Yeah, Skeeter Pond.
Skeeter Pond and that's where you moved to when you first came.
That's where we moved to when we moved off of the Kennedy farm.
Now is it called Kennedy farm because those were the people who owned the farm, right?
Well, what happened, the farm, the two brothers that's who the farm belongs to, that was their farm. They were, like I said, Mr. Henry Kennedy, DuPont bought that. Mr. Herman's part, he didn't ever sell his. His children still have his now, own his now. Then when we left from there me and my daddy and mama and all, we moved down here and we moved up near the Skeeter Pond Road, up there. Old Man Norris Green's old home, that's where we moved at. I stayed there until '41. Me and my wife [lived in] that brick house down there yonder. You might have been down there.
I've seen it.
That was my wife's aunt and uncle's old home. That's where she was living. Then her and her mother moved up here in a little old house up here right on the right, right up here on the side of my daughter's brick house. I got married in '41. After '41, I moved. I stayed on there [at] Mr. Sam Barwick's farm about two years. Left there and went to the Braxton, Joe Braxton and stayed there a year and left there, and I moved down there, moved down in Pitt County to Mr. Gene Harvey on her farm.
Okay, so all these places where you moved to, you were tenant farmer?
Yeah, right. I was a farmer.
All these different places, but you were renting?
Yeah, right.
Okay and before I ask you more about that let me just ask you when your birth date is.
If the Lord blessed me – and I hadn't even thought about it—if the Lord blessed me Sunday, would be my birthday, the third day of June.
How old will you be?
I'll be seventy-eight, if the Lord blessed me.
I hope the Lord blesses you.
I do too.
There's a good chance he will. You'll make it to Sunday.
Yes sir. Yeah, that's my birthday. June the 3rd 1923, that's when I was born.
At the Kennedy farm?
That's right.
So your family, your parents, they were tenant farmers?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My dad was raised on a farm, too. That's where he was raised at.
So he was on that farm his whole life, too?
He was raised up there on that farm too.
What all did you grow? What was your regular—?
Oh, tobacco, cotton, and corn and soybeans.
What was your regular workday like in those days? Did you plow the mules?
Yeah.
What kind of harrows did you use? You said you used walking harrows.
Yeah, walking harrows. Walking harrows—let the mule pull the walking harrow.
Finger like things.
Some of these farms probably have them now, but they are some made up kind of like a turtle ring, but it was a harrow where you walked behind the mule and that's what we plowed tobacco, corn, and cotton to start off with. Then we left there and went to the cotton plow and left there and laying by corn and stuff, we laid it by with a turning plow. Now they use tractors. Wasn't such thing as any, I wish I could find me a mule now.
We'd have a hard time.
Did you have mules?
That's what when I was farming I had.
Did your mules have personalities?
Yeah, Lord.
Tell us about one of your mules.
The mules I could plow my seven acres and [when] the days got long like it is now, I'd take one mule and get out there and plow my seven acres a day.
That would be a really strong mule. That'd be a good sturdy mule.
Lord, have mercy. We had some good mules back in along there.
Did you have brothers and sisters?
Oh yes. I had one, two, three—. I have three sisters living.
So y'all came up together, everybody working?
Yeah, all my sisters and all of them. They all came up on a farm. They were raised on a farm. Yeah, we were raised on a farm.
Did you go to school? Did you have time?
Yeah, I went to school, but back then children didn't think there was going to be any such day like today. Really I didn't get any farther than the third grade. Lots of time we children, instead of going to school, we'd go up there because we had to go through across DuPont up there by the store and go around the woods there and go up. A lot of days we'd go up there and sit down until school was out and come on back home. That's the truth. [We were] bad children, bad. Back along then, I didn't think there would be any days like today. If I had known there were going to be days like today, I'd have been like my mama told me. I'd have been going to school and learned something. I have had chances at some good jobs, just as good as you can get around here, but I just didn't have the learning.
In your day you thought you didn't need to go to school.
That's the way it was. That's just the way it was. That's just what it was. There wasn't anything like it is now. Wasn't anything like it is now. I imagine children were finishing school down there, but there wasn't any such thing like college and stuff like that where I came up.
What did they expect you to do, just get a little bit of school and go to farming or what?
That's right. Then to my daddy, he got—. My daddy stayed sick about all the time when he was on the farm. Then when I wanted to go to school, we had to come out of school and go to work on the farm. That's just the way it was.
You mean after the school day ended.
Yeah. I had to come out before school was ended because what happened, our daddy was sick and he couldn't get out. We had to go ahead and help him on the farm.
So is that part of the reason you didn't go beyond the third grade?
That's it. That's it. Too children bad like children, I look at little children now. I get out and about. But then too, some of them—. Well, my grandchildren are just like I was, but I don't tell them that. Just I don't know how, but we were bad about—. We weren't bad about trying to fight the teachers or nothing like that, but children just out in the street playing, fighting and going on amongst themselves.
Not studying?
Children haven't changed much, have they?
No they haven't.
Uh uh. Not studying any book.
Yeah. So can you read or write a lot or a little or—?
No, I can't do anything but print my name.
Uh uh.
But it's a lot of letters I see now. I can spell, and there's a lot of them I see. I can't spell, but I really believe now, if I had have gone to school, I really believe I would've learned something.
So how did you get by all this time without much schooling? What did you do for a living?
Just farming. I farmed until about, oh I don't know, about '48. '48 I went to construction work—construction work, building stuff. I [had] nothing to do but haul mortar or haul bricks on a wheelbarrow. Most anybody can learn how to do that. So that's all I've done. Then about '70 or '69, I started being a janitor. I did janitor work up until about five years ago.
Is that when you retired?
Yeah, when I retired I was working out here on Number Eleven, the place
they call
Tex File?
Yeah.
What kind of place was it? What did they do?
A factory making pants and different stuff like that. That's the kind of work I did. I hauled yarn out to the ladies that ran the machines and stuff. For about three years now I did janitor work out there—about two or three years. Then I left janitor work and went on the floor and started hauling yarn and doffin. We started doffing, then stopped doffin and the women got to doing their own doffin, and we just had to keep the floor clean and keep the yarn out there to them, the material and stuff for them to do the work.
What did you call it? What was it called?
What is doffin? I've heard of it, but I don't know what it is. Can you tell me what it is?
Doffin rolls off of the machine where they run those
Oh right yeah. Yeah.
That's what it was. So I left there after they went out of business, but
I didn't have to have a job. I didn't try to get me a job. I came home
and went up to
Grifton Sewing factory?
Yeah, Grifton Sewing Manufactory. I worked out there about nine years.
So you did farming, and you did factory work and a combination of all that.
Yeah.
Wow.
That's all I was doing it.
Did you always keep your garden for things to eat or—?
When I was working, I didn't have time to tend a garden [like the one]
up here. I tended one mostly just about like the one out there in front
of my house down
Oh okay, when you stayed home more.
Yeah, right.
Can you take me back to when you were a young man and you were courting? [Tell me about] how you got married and all that—how you met your wife.
Oh Lord, yeah. I met her—. There was a new school. Do you remember when the school was right up here?
Uh uh.
She would go to Grifton School. It's right up here above—. Okay, just when you go out here and go across the bridge and run out to the four-lane, once you run out to the four lane [road] when you turn on the four-lane [road], over there on the right, there was a school over there. That's where I met [my wife]. We were living up there, like I tell you, by the Skeeter Pond. She was going to school, and that's where I met her at, right out there.
How old was she? She was still going to school?
Yeah.
How old was she when you met her?
Yeah. I think my wife—. I think she had finished school. She had finished school.
High school?
Yeah, she'd finished high school, but she didn't go to college or nothing like that.
So you met her when she was still in high school?
Yeah.
So she was quite a young girl when you met her?
Yeah, she was. She wasn't about—. I wasn't but about—. I guess she was about thirteen or fourteen, you know how boys and things were.
When you first met her?
When I first met her. But when we got married, she was real young. My wife wasn't but fifteen. I was seventeen.
You were married a long time.
Yeah, I got married in '41. I believe this coming June—I believe it's this coming June or July—would have made me sixty years, if she had've lived, that we had been married.
Can you tell me why you got married so young? I know in those days people did but—?
Well, I tell you back along then, see, old people were stricter on girls and boys than they are now. You take them now, eleven and twelve years old, you can hardly keep them home. They're out in the street. See, my wife had to stay home. Wasn't any such things as running out to the here club, juke joint, and those things like that. So she got worried then, too, about me loving her. So we hurried up and got married. I think we I went with her about, I guess, about a year or a year and a half.
And then you got married?
Yeah, we got married. We went to South Carolina and got married. I was so young, we couldn't get married around here.
Did you have your parents' permission?
Oh yeah. Yeah.
How come you had to go to South Carolina?
Well, we just
Uh uh. In South Carolina they would marry you that young and around here they wouldn't?
No, they wouldn't around here. See, you had to tell a story down there to get married. You had to run your age up a little bit.
Oh, so you had to tell them you were older? And they believed you?
Oh yeah. Back then, in South Carolina, you could go down there today and
get married. You'd go down there [and] if you got
So that was your honeymoon, sort of, was in South Carolina.
That was my honeymoon.
I'm sure that's right. Then, of course, people didn't have the money to spend on a long honeymoon or whatever. They stayed close to home.
Then too, you could take a trip for maybe about thirty-five or forty dollars. You could go on [a lot less] back along then. I remember the first time me and my daddy went out of his home. I think I was eleven years old or ten years old one. There was a store up here about where DuPont is now is where the store was. We were living over there on the Kennedy farm. Me and him, we walked out there to the store because you could get ten cents worth of cheese, ten cents worth of smoked sausage, and get a loaf of bread for ten cents and you could get a nickel's worth of cheese.
That was in 1941 or so?
Now that was back there in about '36. Back along then, stuff was so cheap.
Right. You know something, the Great Depression came through in the 1930s. Do you remember that time?
Yeah.
Was that harder on you—on your family—during the 1930s? Was that an especially hard time or was it just hard any old time and it wasn't any harder in the '30s?
Uh uh. I tell you what, it wasn't any harder, I think, than it was in the '30s. I tell you what, things started getting kind of good. It was back here in, what I say about really, in the '40s and '39.
It got better?
On up, it got a little better and better.
How did that—?
You could work a little bit more, get a little bit more money and such little things like that there.
There were those jobs that you were telling me about in factories and so on?
Yeah. When I first started to work out on my own—when I was working on the farm—I wasn't getting but fifty cents a day.
Wow. When was that? Like in the '30s?
That was back here in about '35 and '34—back along then, because I started priming tobacco when I was about eight years old. Back then, I was working. I was getting fifty cents a day and we would go out on Saturday and pick cotton on Saturdays and cotton was forty cents a hundred. My mama and daddy give us what we made on Saturdays. I picked fifty pounds of cotton on Saturday. That wasn't but twenty cents. Oh Lord, child, there have been some days back that I can call. I'm telling you the truth. Yes sir. That's right. Then cotton might go on up a little bit, go on up a little bit until it got up to two dollars a hundred.
Now when the government put in price supports for tobacco, did that help your family?
Well, not too much. It didn't really help too much.
It didn't make a different to you too much? By then you were sort of out of farming anyway.
Right. Right.
Oh I see. I see.
I farmed some years we didn't even clear five hundred dollars the whole year.
So how did you live?
I tell you what, off of roasted ear of corn and Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes such little things like that. That's the truth.
That's what you'd eat?
Yeah.
Just what you'd raise?
Yes, sir. I know my mama would get out in the evening and cut a wash pot full of corn and put it in the wash pot and cook it, and that's what we had for supper. People don't even realize now a days, they don't even know what it's all about. That's right. I came up on the rough side of the mountain. I know how it is. I know hard times. I tell you I really, we came up, we had it hard when we came up. Really, when we came up it wasn't such thing as you could go to the furniture store and buy mattresses and stuff like that. We'd go out in the field and get this here clean hay grass and my mama would sew a mattress, and that's what we would lay on. People wouldn't even believe that now.
I do.
I'm serous. That's the truth.
Corn shuck mattresses.
Yes sir. You tell children things like that now. They don't know what it's all about.
No, I think a lot of them don't.
I know they don't because you don't even know anything about that.
Did you, when you were coming up like that, did y'all realize that you were poor or was it just the way everybody was so you didn't realize it?
We realized we were poor. We weren't the only ones that were poor. I mean, there were a lot of people.
Everybody was kind of in the same boat.
Yeah. There you go. There you go. That's just the way it was. That's the way it was.
I'm sorry.
Uh uh. Go ahead on.
So, like all your neighbors who were around and so on, did people help each other like if someone was in trouble or if someone was sick?
Well, back along then they did. Back along then they did help them a whole lot more than they help them now.
Because everybody was poor so they had to—?
I think that's what it must've been. That's just the way it is.
So what was it like? How would people help each other make it through?
Well, I'll tell you, just like if you didn't have, somebody else had. It was like somebody else didn't have, you would have and they would just try to help the people like that there. I know my mama—back along in them days like we had there—she'd get out and kill chickens and preachers would come to the house. All we would get [was] the chicken feet, the neck and the head.
What would the preacher get?
The preacher got the legs, the back and the thigh. The preachers got that, and that's all we got. That's right. You tell somebody about eating a chicken head or chicken feet or something like that there.
Does that make you mad?
Well, we couldn't do any better. We really couldn't do any better along then. We'd get word with the preachers or get word with our mama, we couldn't get nothing but the chicken feet and stuff, but what happened back along then, there wasn't anything we could do about it.
In those days, too, a child isn't going to be arguing with his mama about, 'How come I didn't only get the chicken feet?'
Lord, yeah. I argued with mine a whole lot. I sure did. A lot of days I say something to her, I think about it now. I really ought not have been saying [that], but I wanted something except the feet and the neck.
Yeah. Yeah. So when you were so young and you got married and you were only seventeen or whatever, how did you and your wife make it when you were so young and times were so hard?
Back along then—. Go around this way across the bridge like you're going down—. I don't know whether you've been down to Tick bite or not? But anyhow, when you get on that way, you can go on down in Tick bite. You're going to get around the curve. The road makes a right, to come back out to this road right here. Well, that house right there on the corner, that's not the house me and my wife were living in, but that's where we moved to, right there. That's where I farmed at.
On the Barwick farm?
Right, on the Barwick farm. Yeah. You might have known Mr. Sam?
I did.
Mr. Glenn, yeah.
So you started out farming?
Yeah, I started out. When I started out, I started out farming.
The Barwicks were nice people.
What you talking about, yes sir.
So that was what you knew. That's what you had done as a boy and that's what you knew to do when you got married as a young man.
Yeah, Right. Things got to get a little bit better because when I started I found Mr. Sam over there. We made a little money back now and then. But then, when we left there, I came to the Baxter's over here. One year we made pretty good [money] and then the next year, we didn't clear anything. So that's just the way [it is], a little good and a little bad. When you make twelve hundred dollars, fifteen hundred dollars on a farm, you thought you have made something back along in then.
Yeah, I suppose. Then what would you do the years that you didn't make much? How'd you get by?
Well, what it is, we just had to get little stuff from the stores on credit, and we had to just pay the people back when we got the money. I'd get out and go and work for different people on the farm and get a little money to keep us something to eat.
Odd jobs and so on that was around?
Right.
Did you ever want to own your own land and—?
Well, to tell you the truth, I had a chance. But back along then, when I
was young, I didn't really think there were going to be any days like
today. I had a chance. I had a chance when I was staying with the
Baxters. I had a chance of buying a farm there,
Why?
I didn't want a farm, so Earl Baxter, he bought the farm. Give him twenty-eight hundred dollars for the farm. He sold the farm back to Carolina Power and Light Company for a hundred thousand dollars about six years ago.
Oh my land!
That's right. Yeah. Sure did do it. Carolina Power and Light Company have that place out there now.
Why didn't you want to buy that farm back when you had the chance?
I don't know. Young, young, back then. Young, see I mean—.
That amount of money looked like a million dollars.
What you talking about, yeah.
Where are you going to get that money?
You couldn't visualize that you'd ever be able to pay for it.
I don't know what in the world I was thinking about. They were about
four acres of tobacco on the farm and about four acres of cotton and
maybe about eight or
It is.
That's true.
All right. You have such an interesting life.
What did you say?
I think you have an interesting life.
Yeah. Oh yeah.
I do. I think a lot of people could learn from everything that you're saying.
Right. That's the truth, yes sir. I see my mistake now, but it's too late to look at it.
Everybody's got something like that.
That's right.
Everybody's got something they wish they could do differently.
You know, I don't think you made a lot of mistakes because you raised a wonderful family.
Oh I did. Yeah. Yeah. I raised eight head of children of my own. I
raised two—. I raised four grandchildren, and two more of my
grandchildren. I raised a lot and I never had a bit of trouble out of
them—never had to pay out any money for them but one. That's
So you were pretty strict then with your kids?
No I wasn't. I was just strict anyhow. They can tell you right now. My daughter is the same way. [She] left here a while ago. They can tell you about their daddy and [how he] still is. They are married. I am stricter now. I'm just stricter on them, and they'll tell you right now. Their daddy didn't play, and they loved their daddy. I really raised my children the best I knew how.
You really did.
That's lovely. You and your wife came down here in 1950 to the house down the road?
Yeah, that's where we came.
You built in 1950?
1950. We stopped farming in '49. We moved over the creek here on a farm of a fellow named Josh Welborn. You might hear talk of Josh Wellborn?
Yes, I have.
We were up there farming. I left on the farm that year, and I told him
we weren't going to farm anymore. I moved up the creek right across
there, right across in front of Piggly Wiggly where you see there's a
trailer right across there. You know
Wow. What was it like when you came here in 1950? What was this street like and who all was here?
Well, when we moved down here, it wasn't but the house down on the end down yonder. That's the only house that was there. Not any trailer. My daughter—none of them had—she didn't have a house and she didn't have her's because when we moved there, it wasn't any of them married. None of my children were married.
So when you moved down on this street, there were two houses?
Right.
There was a trailer and your house?
Yes, and one house down yonder. That's right, three houses.
Three houses.
There was an old house right there on the other side of the
So it was more rural then, more country?
Yeah. Yeah.
Then tell me, as your kids grew up and so on, before the flood came, who all in your family lived on this road?
My daughter, Celia, was gone when you got here.
She was in the car.
Well, anyhow, she lived beside me—in the brick house. I lived there in the white house. My daughter, she lived right across in front of Yvette's house here in the trailer—right over where you see those people working, working on her house. And Rosa, my daughter Rosa, she stayed up there. All the other people were living down here.
Yvette lived here.
Uh uh. Yvette, my granddaughter lived here. I raised her up.
So you had several children and a grandchild all on—?
Well, I had eight head of children myself, our own, me and my wife. But one of them died. One got killed. That left us six head—five girls and one boy.
So like three or four came to live on this road, plus your granddaughter?
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Wow. So you had your family all around you?
Yeah.
And they all got flooded?
All of them got flooded. All of my children lived right around me except
two. I've got one daughter in Kinston, that's Yvette's mama.
Where is that?
Way on the other side of Minnesota.
Iowa.
A place called Iowa somewhere. That's where my daughter stayed. She went out there. She met a man out there. He is home from overseas, a white guy. They were going to the same school. They got to going together, and so she called back home. We didn't know she had any idea to get married. Really, back then—. I'm like this. I've got nothing against white folks because I have some white folks who have done more for me than any black people you've seen. I really think a lot of them. I just tell the truth. I really didn't want her to marry the man because he was white. I felt like she was black. Stay in her race. But I know it's getting, isn't any difference. You understand what I'm talking about? So she said, 'Well daddy, if you and mama don't want me to marry him, I'm going to marry him anyhow'. Well there wasn't anything we could do. But after she married him, I'll tell the truth, he is just one of the best white men you ever saw. I don't believe I need it. It wouldn't be anything I'd call on that he wouldn't give me.
So now do you feel differently about—?
Yeah. Yeah. See, I didn't have anything different against whites. But
you know, I just—. Like this, I was just saying, 'Well, you just stay in
your own color.' But I know that we're getting to the time and getting
to the place that black marrying white, white marrying black. After I
got used to him and he came down here and he did more work for me than
my own children would do. So that's just the way it is. I believe if I
want anything, he would give it to me. That's what I say about him. He's
just as nice as everything.
There's a chair right there.
No I was looking for my pocketbook. I don't know what I did with my pocketbook.
Took it into the house.
Look in the house. Look in the house and see if it's in there.
So, that's just the way it is. So really, I mean, when I worked, I
worked around—. There would be a lot of black people sitting there
working. I have worked around whites all my life. Right today I could
give you people's names and all you've got to do is get on the telephone
and call them and ask them about Bud or usually ask them about Lester.
See, if they don't tell you
Do you put that down to your raising or faith or what? What gives you your values that you have in your life?
Yeah. I mean I was raised in my life. My mama and daddy raised me that respect everybody, 'Yes sir' and 'No sir.' It wasn't like these little young children around now saying, 'Little Bud, Yeah Little Bud, Hey Little Bud, or Hey Lester,' like that there. There wasn't any such thing like that when I was growing up. It was, 'Yes ma'am,' and 'No ma'am.'
In your day.
That's right.
Did everybody behave like that?
Yes. Yes, ma'am. All my family did. But you take around here now, a lot
of children now they don't even respect grown folks no more or anything
now. It's just the way it is now. That's just the way the world is
now—the peoples of the world.
That was a rule.
That was the rule.
Is that how you raised your kids, too?
Well, I raised them. I wasn't that strict over them, but they know when
night comes, they'd better be in and they did. They did. I didn't have
any trouble out of them. I didn't have any trouble with them running out
here to these juke joints at all. The only one, like I said, the
So what all happened to all of you? You're all living on the street. What all happened when the flood came? What happened to everybody?
Oh Lord, have mercy. When they came and got us out that night about one o'clock, one-thirty, me and my wife when we got out, we got out with what we had slept in. I think I put my pants on over my pajamas. She had on her nightclothes and we got out then. If we hadn't have, we couldn't have gotten out.
What did it look like?
It looked like—. I don't know, it just looked like an ocean. That's what it was. The water came right on up in our house—right on over the beds, the dressers and everything.
Were you in bed when the water came up?
No. Uh uh. See, they came around. They were coming around through blowing horns and blowing and getting people ready and people out of their house because the water was coming so fast. About nine o'clock that Thursday night, it wasn't a bit of water down that street anywhere about nine o'clock. Back out here to the highway, turned to go up toward Hugo, the four-lane [road], there wasn't any water down there. By one-thirty when my daughter just left here. They stay right across there in that trailer there. When they came down here to get us up, get us out, by the time we could get out and get back down here, the water was running in the back seat of the car. That's just how fast that water was running.
Oh my word.
Yes sir.
What a shock.
Then when we got out here and turned and were going to go out that way to the four-lane [highway], the water was running in the back seat of the car. It was running across there, where it was running so fast. I imagine that water was rising a foot every half-hour, if not more than that. It might have been rising more than that. Like near something had juiced right out. That's the way it had done. Something juiced right out. That's the way it was.
So where all did you go?
We went to Kinston to live with my daughter over there. That's where we went.
And your kids, where did they go?
Well, half of them, some of them went to my brother's. My daughters that are married, they went to their daughters' house and stayed with them, took them in.
So you were lucky to have a lot of family in the area.
Yeah. Yeah.
In order to take everybody in, so nobody had to go to shelter.
No. Thank God none of my whole family had to go to a shelter.
Wow.
That's just the way it is. My daughter, she has a big house over in Kinston. Wasn't anybody but her and her husband, and my son—the one Miss Betty knows—that stays up here right at Kinston. He has a two-story house. He has enough room where it probably couldn't have slept everybody on beds, but as many rooms as he's got, if you got pallets and got on the floor—. He took care—. He had about fifteen head of people in his house that he took care of. A lot of people from over the creek, they went up there in Georgetown and started staying up there. I don't know what happened. They got put out or something. He took all of them in. He had a houseful. That's true.
So your family really helped each other.
Oh yeah. Oh yeah, that's one thing about that.
Because it would've been a lot worse to have to go to a shelter and—
Well, and see, my wife helped along then. It would've been some kind of bad to got her when of them little bitty mobile home—you know like the little trailers —where they were in. What happened, the rescue squad had to come and got her about—if they didn't get her twice a week—every week to carry her to the hospital. She had had a spell. You see that little old place like that there, it would've been bad for them trying to get in there and get out with the stretchers to get her out.
So it would've been really hard for her health to stay at a shelter?
Yeah.
What did she have to go to the hospital for?
Well, what happened, her fluids weren't getting any of the fluids out of her. Her fluids would be building up. Her heart got bad. Somebody got wrong with her and they had to carry her to the hospital. My wife near about stayed in the hospital. It's true.
So she stayed with your family members as well?
Right, oh yeah. She stayed at where I stayed.
She went to your daughters. Then how long was it—
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[How long] was it that you had to stay away before you could come back here?
Well, before we could come back—. I think the water stayed up here about two weeks before you could come back down again and look.
Then you could look.
Yeah, you could look. The water got out enough that you could go to your house and look inside if you wanted to.
Did you?
Yeah, we looked in. Lord knows it was a sight. We went in and looked in it. Then that Wednesday my wife had just gone out and gotten her grocery stuff up for the month and filled the refrigerator up full. That was on that Wednesday. That Thursday night when that water rose in there Friday morning everything got spoiled.
So you lost all that food.
Yeah, we lost everything. My granddaughter here, she had a single-wide
trailer. All it did do is to come up, excuse me.
Even if it's just your garden or whatever.
That's what I did. In my garden that's what— If it isn't raining, you
come look at me. Unless I get sick and have to go to the doctor, you can
go down there from my house and drive out there, right out there in the
field, and head out there and look.
So you didn't go back and live in the doublewide with your daughter?
We came here and stayed with my granddaughter here.
Okay, in this house here.
Yeah, right here. That's where we stayed.
Okay, okay. Was your wife happy to get back to here too?
Yeah, she was more happy than she was in Kinston. Yes, sir.
Can you tell me, even though the neighborhood had flooded so bad and it could flood again because it's so near the creek, why did y'all want to come back to this very spot?
Well, tell you the truth about it, we just figure that we wouldn't live to see the water get back in there any more.
That's what you thought.
Yeah.
You thought that it's a rare thing [and] that it wouldn't happen again in your lifetime?
That's what I was thinking.
Your wife, did you she think that too?
Yeah, my wife, she wanted to come back here. That's the reason we came
back. If it had been on that road over there right at the creek, now I
don't know—
So you've seen other floods and other disasters but nothing like—
Nothing like—
Floyd.
Never seen anything like this one here. If I live to like— I said Sunday
I'll be seventy-eight years old, and I've been around here all my life.
When I lived up on Kennedy farm we
So he was lucky to be alive.
Yeah, he was. He really was. The lady right across there—the first brick house when you get across here going back that way on the right—they had to come in there and get them out that Friday morning on the boat because they didn't even know the water had gotten like that.
So do you feel lucky to at least have gotten away with your lives?
Yes,