Page 1 of 62 
 
Washington Women’s Heritage Project records, 1900-2000 
University of Washington Libraries Special Collections 
Dorothy Mae Harris Turner 
April 29, 1983 
Cassettes 1-2 
 
 
Mary L. Rice  00:00 
--eight o'clock, at 1416 31st Avenue. I'm interviewing Dorothy Mae Turner. My name is Mary 
Rice, and this is interview one, side one. 
 
Mary L. Rice  00:12 
OK. [Inaudible] [laughs]. I can't help it.  
 
Mary L. Rice  00:19 
All right. Let's start with your grandparents. What were your father's parents' names? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  00:29 
Joe Harris and Lula Harris. 
 
Mary L. Rice  00:33 
Joe and Lula, OK. And where were they? Were they in Mississippi?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  00:39 
Yes. 
 
Mary L. Rice  00:40 
OK, and that was in what town? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  00:43 
Etta. 
 
Mary L. Rice  00:43 
Etta, OK. And your mother's parents? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  00:49 
Jake and Nancy Ivy. 
 
Mary L. Rice  00:54 
Now, do you remember very much about them? Were they still alive when you were a child? 
Page 2 of 62 
 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  00:59 
Jake was, but I was very small when he died, and Nancy was killed accidentally before I was 
born.  
 
Mary L. Rice  01:09 
OK. Now this was your mother's parents. Is that right?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  01:11 
Yes. 
 
Mary L. Rice  01:12 
OK. What happened to her? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  01:15 
She was out hanging clothes, hanging up clothes in the backyard, and her sons was repairing a 
shotgun. 
 
Mary L. Rice  01:27 
About how old was this man? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  01:29 
Well, the one that was repairing was about 14, and the other one was about 12. The 14 year old 
was tightening up the trigger on the gun, but his screwdriver didn't work properly, so he set the 
unloaded gun down by the door, leaned it up against the wall, and went for a good screwdriver. 
The 12 year old didn't know that the 14 year old was repairing the gun, so he picked it up and put 
the bullet in -- the shell in -- and then he set it right back in the same place and went to get his 
coat so they could go hunting. The 14 year old came back, picked up the gun because he had just 
sat it there, thinking that it was unloaded, tightened up the trigger a little bit, pulled a hammer 
back, leaned it to the side to see would it fall. And it did, and the bullet hit his mother out in the 
backyard. She was hanging up clothes. 
 
Mary L. Rice  02:40 
And did-- was she killed instantly, or...? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  02:42 
No, but she died in about six hours. 
 
Mary L. Rice  02:48 
This was in Etta, Mississippi? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  02:50 
Yes, [crosstalk] the rural area. 
 
Mary L. Rice  02:53 
What kind of medical care did she get? 
Page 3 of 62 
 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  02:56 
A little country doctor, they ran for him, [?into the?]-- 
 
Mary L. Rice  03:01 
How long did that take to get a doctor out there?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  03:04 
About an hour. 
 
Mary L. Rice  03:06 
So was she brought into the house then, or...? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  03:09 
No, it was Southern, so they came out. When the doctor got there, he just disrobed her out in the 
backyard and all the neighbors looking in on it.  
 
Mary L. Rice  03:20 
Well, what race was this doctor?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  03:23 
White. 
 
Mary L. Rice  03:24 
Yeah. And she died there, then?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  03:28 
Yes.  
 
Mary L. Rice  03:29 
OK, now, did any of your immediate family, were they there, or did they know about it?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  03:35 
Well, my grandfather was there, but he was so upset that he didn't pay any attention. But when 
my mother arrived, she discovered that her mother was laying out on the-- in the backyard with 
no clothes on. So she immediately went in the house and got a sheet and covered her up and 
warned the doctor, if he pulled all of her clothes off again, he would leave.  
 
Mary L. Rice  03:58 
Well, she was angry with him? Was-- 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  04:00 
Right. She told him if he-- 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  04:00 
Yes. 
Page 4 of 62 
 
 
Mary L. Rice  04:00 
--did she display that anger to the [crosstalk]?  
 
Mary L. Rice  04:03 
Was there any danger in her doing--?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  04:06 
No, not at that time. At that time a woman could talk mean to a white person without any trouble, 
but a man couldn't. 
 
Mary L. Rice  04:13 
OK. About what year would this have been? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  04:16 
I think that was about 1922. 
 
Mary L. Rice  04:20 
OK. So you-- you're saying that women were a little bit freer than men, at that point. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  04:30 
Yes, especially if they was dealing with a white man.  
 
Mary L. Rice  04:33 
OK, so a Black woman could be angry at a white man?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  04:37 
Yes, she could be angry and talk mean to a white man without any repercussions.  
 
Mary L. Rice  04:41 
What if she hit him or something like that?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  04:43 
Well, it depended on who he was. It depended on how many powerful white friends she had. If 
she had-- was working for a white man that was very powerful, then she could do a lot more to 
another white man because this guy she was working for would protect her. But-- 
 
Mary L. Rice  05:03 
Well, assuming that he would protect her, I mean--  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  05:05 
Yes.  
 
Mary L. Rice  05:06 
--would he generally protect her? 
 
Page 5 of 62 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  05:07 
Yes. 
 
Mary L. Rice  05:07 
OK, all right. So did-- was that something that was done? I mean, as far as you heard, is that 
something that was done?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  05:07 
Yes. 
 
Mary L. Rice  05:07 
And say, she worked for a judge, or something like that, and she did something to, I don't know, 
a white sharecropper. Would the-- could she count on the judge protecting her?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  05:26 
[?Yeah.?] 
 
Mary L. Rice  05:26 
Did Black women try and and work for more powerful Black-- or, excuse me, whites?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  05:31 
Well, the thing is, when they worked for these whites, if they was a very good worker, they was 
hard to replace, and this guy wasn't protecting us so much because he liked her so much, but 
protecting himself because he could get so much more work out of her.  
 
Mary L. Rice  05:53 
You know, what about your paternal grandparents? Do you remember anything about them now? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  05:59 
Yes, they lived with us when I was quite small. My grandmother was very mean to some of my 
brothers and sisters and cousins. She was nice to [?me?].  
 
Mary L. Rice  06:13 
Were you [?one?] on mean side, or the...?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  06:15 
Yeah, I was one of the [?good?] ones, and she catered to the [?red ones?] and looked down on 
the [?darker?] [inaudible].  
 
Mary L. Rice  06:22 
Because you had a fairer complexion than them? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  06:24 
Right. 
 
Mary L. Rice  06:27 
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Do you have any idea why she did that?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  06:28 
She was prejudiced. 
 
Mary L. Rice  06:31 
Was she dark?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  06:33 
No. Blonde and blue eyed. 
 
Mary L. Rice  06:33 
And she look--? 
 
Mary L. Rice  06:35 
Oh, she was a mulatto. So did she look white? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  06:35 
Mulatto. 
 
Mary L. Rice  06:44 
Or did she just look funny because she had blonde hair and blue eyes? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  06:45 
[Crosstalk.]  
 
Mary L. Rice  06:46 
She looked white. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  06:46 
No.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  06:47 
She looked white. 
 
Mary L. Rice  06:48 
[Crosstalk.] 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  06:49 
[Crosstalk.] 
 
Mary L. Rice  07:04 
OK. [They laugh] Now, you were born in 19-- what? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  07:08 
--30. 
Page 7 of 62 
 
 
Mary L. Rice  07:09 
1930. And which child were you and what-- I mean, how many children were in your family?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  07:15 
Twelve.  
 
Mary L. Rice  07:16 
And which child were you?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  07:17 
Number seven. 
 
Mary L. Rice  07:19 
So you were down toward the end? Was there-- were all the children very close together, or were 
there gaps in the family? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  07:29 
There were gaps, usually with a cluster of four. There'd be four that was close enough together 
that they associated with each other a lot, and then there was a middle group, and then there was 
the last group, and I was that third in the middle group. 
 
Mary L. Rice  07:48 
Oh, you were in the middle group.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  07:50 
And then I had four younger ones.  
 
Mary L. Rice  07:53 
OK, now, did the older children take care of the younger children?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  07:59 
Yes. 
 
Mary L. Rice  08:00 
So your mother wasn't that involved in childcare after the first four got big enough to take care of 
themselves.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  08:06 
[Crosstalk] just only when they were infants, little, tiny infants, and when she was able to go 
back to work, she did so. 
 
Mary L. Rice  08:11 
Oh, so she cared for the infants. Up to about what age, would you say? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  08:15 
Page 8 of 62 
 
Oh, I would say, two, two and a half months.  
 
Mary L. Rice  08:19 
And then she turned it over to whom?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  08:21 
To the next one-- the one that was too small to work was the one that babysat, the one that was-- 
couldn't get a full wage. 
 
Mary L. Rice  08:30 
Oh, so as soon as-- well, what would be big enough to work? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  08:35 
I think you could get full wage by the time you was 10 or 12. So the next [crosstalk]-- 
 
Mary L. Rice  08:42 
So the first four-- by the time you were born, the first four were out earning money, so it was 
somebody in your cluster-- 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  08:49 
In my cluster. 
 
Mary L. Rice  08:50 
--that was taking care of [?you?]. OK, when did you have to start taking care of kids?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  08:59 
When I was seven.  
 
Mary L. Rice  09:01 
Years old? What did you do prior to that? I mean, did you w-- did you just play a lot? Or what 
did you do?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  09:09 
Oh, no, we kept. We dragged in wood for the stove, because we had to cook on a-- over a wood 
stove.  
 
Mary L. Rice  09:18 
Drug it in when you couldn't carry it? [They laugh.]  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  09:21 
Weren't big enough to carry it, and we dragged it. And then when we got big enough, they'd give 
us some of the-- the little kids carried the small block, and the big kids carried the big blocks, 
because we would try to take it up to the yard and then split it. And that way, you carried the 
block of wood according to your size [laughs]. 
 
Mary L. Rice  09:28 
Page 9 of 62 
 
So when did you-- when would you have started doing that?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  09:45 
Oh, gosh, I guess when I was three. Soon as I could walk good without falling [laughs]. 
 
Mary L. Rice  09:52 
When did you play? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  09:55 
When the work was done [laughs]. 
 
Mary L. Rice  09:59 
 You started real early.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  10:00 
Well, mostly you didn't have to carry wood all day. You just carried in enough wood for 
[crosstalk]--  
 
Mary L. Rice  10:04 
Oh, OK, so you were out playing most of the time [crosstalk]. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  10:07 
Yeah, we played [crosstalk]. We played. And then we-- when we was quite small, we'd still 
watch out for the other little kids younger than us, because it was sort of a family group. 
 
Mary L. Rice  10:19 
Well, I guess everybody in that family was working pretty hard.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  10:21 
Yeah, with so many in the family, you had to. One paycheck wouldn't feed that many people, so 
you had to have paychecks for everybody that was big enough to earn. And then the little ones 
had to carry their weight, too.  
 
Mary L. Rice  10:34 
So they went out and earned a paycheck and just brought it home and turned it over to parents 
then? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  10:40 
They didn't collect it. They earned it, and then my parents collected it. 
 
Mary L. Rice  10:48 
OK, what's your first memory? What's the first thing that you can remember? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  10:54 
Page 10 of 62 
 
Oh, my little brother, he was trying to be a cowboy. He got on this little calf to ride, and this little 
calf ran under tree branch and knocked him off and knocked him unconscious. And I thought he 
was dead, and it frightened me so, till it never went away. 
 
Mary L. Rice  11:11 
Was there somebody else at home at that time? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  11:13 
Only the teenagers was there [inaudible], didn't watch him, until you fell and then they ran out 
[inaudible]. 
 
Mary L. Rice  11:22 
OK, about how old were you then?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  11:24 
About two.  
 
Mary L. Rice  11:25 
So you must have been really attached to that brother.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  11:27 
Yeah, he was my big brother [crosstalk].  
 
Mary L. Rice  11:29 
What was his name?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  11:30 
James. 
 
Mary L. Rice  11:31 
James. He was older than you?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  11:32 
Yes, three years older than me.  
 
Mary L. Rice  11:37 
What's your next [?memory?]?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  11:40 
Oh, my sister, Jobie, we were going someplace -- I can't remember now just where. But anyway, 
she was too lazy to walk, and she screamed for the big brothers and sisters to carry her. And 
[inaudible] one of my big teenage brothers just reached out and got her by one leg and dragged 
her across. He didn't let her head hit, you know, but he carried her upside down for a while [they 
laugh]. When put her down, she didn't-- no  screamed to get [inaudible] [they laugh]. 
 
Mary L. Rice  12:10 
Page 11 of 62 
 
She probably felt her feet were a lot [inaudible] on the ground than in somebody's hands.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  12:15 
It frightened me, though, to see her carried upside down, and that's why I probably remember 
that. I still I was three, three and a half or something. 
 
Mary L. Rice  12:28 
What do you remember about the countryside when you were very small? What did it look like? 
Was it, you know, green like Washington, or...? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  12:36 
Not in the wintertime, no. It was green in the summer, and the winters were short. They are now 
in most places down there. About March, you could always [inaudible] pull off your shoes. 
Didn't have to put them back on until you're going someplace. We would never go anyplace 
barefoot. But at home, our feet was what we wore [laughs] in the summertime when we were 
playing around. 
 
Mary L. Rice  13:01 
[Crosstalk] imagine you could-- but your parents were sharecroppers for a number of years, 
right?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  13:06 
Yes, when we were real small. 
 
Mary L. Rice  13:07 
And plus they worked outside of your [?allotment?]? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  13:11 
Yes. They would get their crop [?laid by?], and then they would go to other people in order to 
bring in more money, because we didn't make enough out of what we got from [?our crop?] to 
carry us through the winter. So we always had to get extra money to get clothes and shoes and 
things for a family that size. 
 
Mary L. Rice  13:32 
Yeah, but you didn't have many clothes [crosstalk.] 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  13:36 
No, no. We always had nice things to wear out, but at home, we'd wear the thing that had been 
remodeled, that we'd outgrown the year before.  
 
Mary L. Rice  13:46 
I bet you there were a lot of hand-me-downs.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  13:48 
Oh, right. The big girls-- the big kids [inaudible] in clusters of four. There wasn't enough, 
because the next cluster-- I mean, the last cluster was mostly boys, so they could hand down all 
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their things to each other, but they couldn't wear our stuff, because the girls, Jobie and I was in 
the last-- the last two in that third cluster, so our hand-me-downs couldn't go any further. And 
then James was so big, it took them a long time to get into his clothes, because he was three 
years older than me and I was 11 years older than the youngest. So that was a great big gap in 
there for clothes. So those had to have clothes made for them, if Mama had time, and if not, they 
had to get hand-me-down from someplace else or Mama had to go buy. And once in a while, we 
would buy used clothes [crosstalk].  
 
Mary L. Rice  14:48 
Where would you buy used clothes? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  14:50 
[?Hand-new?] shops in the city. [Inaudible] [?used?]. 
 
Mary L. Rice  14:56 
How close were you to the city? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  14:58 
Oh, at that time, about 10 miles, I suppose. 
 
Mary L. Rice  15:04 
OK, 10 miles from-- 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  15:07 
Oxford.  
 
Mary L. Rice  15:08 
--from Oxford. That was the city. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  15:09 
Mm-hmm.  
 
Mary L. Rice  15:11 
I thought Oxford was kind of a small town. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  15:14 
Well, it was, but to us, that was a big town, because that was the biggest thing around.  
 
Mary L. Rice  15:19 
So you-- did your farm-- your parents' farm was 10 miles from Oxford. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  15:24 
No, at that time, when I was that small, but our farm was only about six miles when they finally 
bought a farm.  
 
Mary L. Rice  15:30 
Page 13 of 62 
 
Oh, OK. [Crosstalk]-- 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  15:32 
[Crosstalk] that's when they was doing sharecropping. 
 
Mary L. Rice  15:34 
So they sharecropped until about when?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  15:39 
Oh, I think it was about 1942.  
 
Mary L. Rice  15:41 
OK. Can you explain [inaudible] what a sharecropper is? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  15:47 
They sort of rent the land, but everything that they make they have to give the owner of the land 
half of. You do all of the raising. The owner furnished the seed and some of the-- I mean, and the 
equipment. And then you do all of the labor, but then when you harvest the crop, he gets half of 
it. 
 
Mary L. Rice  16:14 
So it doesn't cost much to get into sharecropping [inaudible]. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  16:18 
Not anything, because all you have to do is to have a lot of... Most sharecroppers wants a big 
family that's got a lot of big kids that's big enough to work, so that they can get their money's 
worth out of their land. And with my four grown -- almost grown -- late teen brothers and sisters, 
that the boys to plow and the girls to hoe and everything, there was six adult sized people that 
could turn out a good crop, because my older brothers could pick over 300 pounds of cotton a 
piece. 
 
Mary L. Rice  16:52 
Did your parents raise cotton?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  16:54 
Yeah. They raised cotton, corn, sweet potatoes, and all types of vegetables. But the basic thing 
they sold was cotton. That was the money market price.  
 
Mary L. Rice  17:07 
Did they have-- 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  17:08 
[Inaudible] cash crop.  
 
Mary L. Rice  17:09 
Did they ever sell the vegetables? Or did they just raise the vegetables for themselves? 
Page 14 of 62 
 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  17:13 
You'd raise the vegetables mostly for ourselves. We would sell watermelon and cantaloupes or 
something like that. But most of the vegetables, we just harvest what we had to eat, 
 
Mary L. Rice  17:24 
And did you have to split that with the owner, too? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  17:28 
I can't remember, because I'm so small at that time. I can't remember if we had to split all of that, 
or did we had to split the price of the cotton or the corn. We also sold corn. So I knew that the 
corn and the cotton had to be split down the middle. But our private garden, I don't know if they 
took part in the watermelons or what, but I know we would take a load of watermelons to the 
church on Sundays and sell them, so that was a nice little check from that.  
 
Mary L. Rice  17:59 
OK, now, when you were talking about the church... Did your parents always attend church?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  18:06 
Yes. The whole family attended church.  
 
Mary L. Rice  18:09 
OK. And were your parents real religious? Or was this kind of a community gathering, or both?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  18:16 
Both.  
 
Mary L. Rice  18:18 
How much time did you spend in church? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  18:22 
Well, most of the day Sunday. We'd get up early and go to Sunday school and stay through 
church, and then we'd come home and have something to eat and go back to afternoon church on 
Sundays. Mostly we [inaudible] church three-- at least three times on Sunday, but we didn't go to 
the church much during the week, except once a year we would have Rrevival, and that was for a 
full week every night.  
 
Mary L. Rice  18:46 
Tell me about revival.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  18:48 
Well, that was when people joined the church and we had religious prayers and preachers. 
Visiting preachers would come from all over the state, and they just [inaudible] religious 
gathering. 
 
Mary L. Rice  19:07 
Page 15 of 62 
 
Wasn't it fun? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  19:11 
Well, to us it was. At least it was [inaudible]. But we was too small to know too much about 
religion at that time. So then we [crosstalk]-- 
 
Mary L. Rice  19:23 
Well, yeah. How often did you see, you know, the other people in the community, other than 
being at school?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  19:29 
Well, we'd go to church every Sunday. See, we see the-- but the visiting people that we would 
enjoy, they would be out of the city and some of them little towns around and we'd visit from 
place to place, and we'd enjoy it. And it was someplace to go. 'Cause down there, there wasn't a 
whole lot of places that you could go to. 
 
Mary L. Rice  19:44 
So basically, school and Sunday school were the places that you went to to meet people? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  19:49 
Yes, other than our-- yes. We'd go to meet people and then we'd get in programs, and then we-- 
on Mother's Days, we had children programs, and Easters, and things like that. And we'd get up 
and sing and recite [?psalms and their things?] and [?we'd have a?] time. 
 
Mary L. Rice  20:10 
I don't suppose you remember anything you ever had to recite. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  20:14 
[Laughs] Well I can remember the dances we used to do, but not in the church, but in the 
schools. We'd have school plays also, and I'd enjoy dancing. And I learned to [?truck?] when I 
was about six. [They laugh] I thoroughly enjoyed it. I'd pick up all of the dances. And I enjoyed 
making believe I was somebody else in the plays that we had. All of the kids would get out, and 
after a while [?we did the?]-- first I was nervous. Then after a while, I get used to it and really 
enjoyed it. [Crosstalk]-- 
 
Mary L. Rice  20:44 
I noticed you're kind of a nervous person. How did it-- were you extremely nervous when you 
started performing? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  20:51 
Oh, when I first started, then we had to get up in front of a big audience. I was a nervous wreck 
for two or three days. But at school, when it was just families of the kids that we went to school 
with, played with all the time, then I didn't get so nervous [inaudible] the school plays because 
the audience was always small. But I didn't like getting up in church, especially when we was at 
a visiting church, and when they would come to our church and sing and recite, then we'd have 
Page 16 of 62 
 
to go to theirs, and when I go to theirs, that's when I really fell apart. But I had to do it, so I grit 
my teeth and hold my heads real tight and didn't shake and dribble, but I was scared to death. 
 
Mary L. Rice  21:34 
How did you get back and forth places to church and to school?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  21:42 
Dad always had a truck, and he and Mama would get in the driver's-- I mean, in the front, and all 
of us kids -- sometimes it was barely standing room only. We filled up the back of the truck. And 
if the neighbor kids was around, we'd all stand. The little ones, of course, would sit [inaudible] 
the balance, but -- lose their balance, rather -- but the big ones would always stand, and we'd ride 
from church to church and enjoy the wind [inaudible] [they laugh] or blowing the [?curls?] out of 
our way.  
 
Mary L. Rice  22:17 
Was there much to hold on to back then?  
 
Mary L. Rice  22:19 
Tell me about your mother. What kind of woman was your mother?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  22:19 
Yeah, the truck had [inaudible], [inaudible]. The back--  
 
Mary L. Rice  22:23 
[Crosstalk] anybody.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  22:23 
--the tailgate was the only thing. Yeah, we [?lose it?], but they get [?up out ready to catch it 
again?] [laughs]. The big boys would be playing around, horsing around. [Inaudible] fall out 
once in a while. And if they couldn't catch up, then they'd knock on the [inaudible] and wait for 
us. They'd yell at each other, "Just stay in there and stop clowning!" [Laughs.] 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  22:49 
Very strict but very fair. We-- she didn't believe in yelling at kids, but she believed in hitting a 
lot [laughs]. She believed in talking soft and carrying a big stick [laughs], because there was a lot 
of big boys in the family that was a lot taller than she was.  
 
Mary L. Rice  23:07 
Oh, was she a small woman?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  23:08 
Not small, but short. She weighed about 179 pounds, but she was only five foot five. And she 
well put together. She wasn't as huge as she was heavy. She always had a small waistline, but she 
had-- from her waist downwas where she carried her size, huge legs and small feet and big arms. 
So she'd take on one of them.  
 
Page 17 of 62 
 
Mary L. Rice  23:38 
It must have been kind of hard to get attention in a family 12. I mean, from your mother 
[inaudible]. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  23:42 
Well, the way-- with as many that was in our family, something we didn't expect a lot of 
personal attention. We learned to be independent when we were quite small, and we learned to 
look after the little ones, the little children. We'd not only look after them at home, but when we 
was in school. We-- if the little one started a fight, we let him get pushed around a little bit. But 
we never stood by and let nobody hurt our brothers and sisters. And it was such a big family of 
us, it was always one bigger piling on the top of the stack. So we were sort of known as the 
"Harris gang" [laughs]. Everybody [crosstalk] scared [crosstalk]. 
 
Mary L. Rice  24:18 
You were a fighting clan, huh?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  24:20 
We had to. And, you know, little kids they u-- especially when you came into a new 
neighborhood, kids tried to push you around, but then they finally learned that there was a big 
brother over there, and a even bigger sister, and another big brother. And when they came up 
with a few bloody nose, everybody left the Harris bunch alone [laughs]. 
 
Mary L. Rice  24:40 
Is that something that's usual? I mean, do you usually find a lot of big families, and so you just 
don't fight with the kids too much, because there's always somebody bigger than--?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  24:50 
Right. You don't mess with the little kids in a big family, because in almost every school, there's 
at least six kids there, and everybody-- if you pick on that little one, there's five big ones there 
are gonna take up for him, and if that's his brother or sister, he will take up for him. So you don't 
pick on big families very much, unless your family is big and strong. 
 
Mary L. Rice  25:11 
Would you ever have any big contest with any other big families?  
 
Mary L. Rice  25:14 
Sounds like war [they laugh]. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  25:14 
Once in a while, but not-- ours was the biggest. So we didn't have too many because there was 
always one more bigger one [laughs]. And then if it got too bad, there was always a big brother 
that wasn't in school would come over and take care of it for you [laughs].  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  25:30 
Page 18 of 62 
 
It was. So long as a little kid picked on you, fine. They let the little kids, you know, fight among 
themselves. But when some big would come in there and start to hurt somebody, there was 
always a big one to come in.  
 
Mary L. Rice  25:44 
And by the time you were in school, or barely, like, I don't know, eighth grade or something, did 
you do--?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  25:53 
I was the biggest there.  
 
Mary L. Rice  25:54 
And so it was your turn to [crosstalk] and-- 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  25:56 
It was my turn to carry it down to the little one. If the little one got into a fight with a little kid 
equally his size, and they fought nicely, or if they start hurting each other, you just pull them 
apart. But if one of his big sisters or one of his big brothers came in, if a sister your size, you 
took him on fair and square. If he weren't, you got a walking stick. And if he was a big boy and 
you weren't as big as him, you got something to equal it up and went in and took care of it.  
 
Mary L. Rice  26:23 
So the Harrises didn't stand on the ceremony as far as fighting was concerned, the object was to 
win.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  26:30 
Right. You didn't go in there to get hurt. You went in there to hurt. We didn't do bad hurt, but we 
stopped a few [?classes?]. But we never started fights, we would stop them. I mean, the big ones. 
The big ones would never start a fight with little kids. But if the little kids would fight among 
themselves, we stood by, you know, as long as they were, because the average little kid can't hurt 
each other. They push and shove and scream and yell, so you saw the big noise. But if his big 
brother or sister came along, that's when you stepped in. 
 
Mary L. Rice  27:08 
OK, I think we skipped over a couple of things when you were... There area a couple of things 
I'd like to go back and pick up. One is something that happened when you were about seven 
years old to cousins that had to move out of town.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  27:31 
Oh, yeah, that's back when they used to have lynch mobs down there. And my uncle, his-- the 
people he worked-- sharecropped with, he-- one of the guys that he was working for, his 
grandchilden set the great big dog on him. 
 
Mary L. Rice  28:05 
[Inaudible.] What's the uncle's name? Or has it been a while? 
 
Page 19 of 62 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  28:11 
It's been a while.  
 
Mary L. Rice  28:13 
He was an Ivy.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  28:14 
Bus. 
 
Mary L. Rice  28:15 
Bus Ivy? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  28:16 
Bus Ivy, that was his name.  
 
Mary L. Rice  28:18 
OK, now he was working for a white man?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  28:21 
Yes, he was sharecropping for a white man. And this guy had a grown son, and this was his 
grandson that was on the father's side down. 
 
Mary L. Rice  28:35 
[Crosstalk.] 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  28:35 
He was the grandfather on the father's side, [?the great-grandfather?].  
 
Mary L. Rice  28:37 
The white man's grandson? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  28:40 
Uh-huh. Stick this dog on this-- 
 
Mary L. Rice  28:43 
On Bus Ivy. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  28:44 
--Bus Ivy. And he told him to call that dog off, because if that dog came on, he would shoot him. 
And he didn't believe him. So the kid stood there until he pulled out his pistol. And then the kid 
come running, because he didn't want his dog shot. And just as he aimed down on the dog, this 
kid grabbed the dog around the neck, and Bus blew the dog's brains out, and it got all over the 
kid and everything. And that made this kid's father angry. He wanted to hang Bus.  
 
Mary L. Rice  29:20 
For shooting the dog?  
Page 20 of 62 
 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  29:21 
For shooting the dog, not only just for shooting the dog, but shooting that dog and taking a 
chance on killing his son. So the grandfather, the one that Bus was working for, gave Bus a 
shotgun, two boxes of shells, and sent him up into the mountain-- up in the hills -- it wasn't 
mountains, but up in the hills -- in the woods, and told him to shoot anybody that came for him. 
Says, "Nobody is allowed up here but me." Says, "I'll bring you food and what so but if you see 
anybody else coming up here, you shoot them." So he sent him up there, and he stayed up there 
for three weeks. And this son got him a gang together and came for him. But then he found out 
that he had a shotgun and two boxes of shell and was going to shoot anybody that came for him, 
he didn't go. So Bus stayed up there for two or three weeks, and then he came back down to the 
farm to help out. So while he would work in the farm, the owner of the farm would ride shotgun. 
And for the-- for about nine months, that's the way he kept him alive, by riding shotgun while he 
was working and let-- and letting him take the guns and shells to protect himself at night. And 
then the old man had a heart attack and died. [Tape cuts.] 
 
Mary L. Rice  31:07 
Dorothy Turner interview one, side two.  
 
Mary L. Rice  31:12 
OK. Now, when we ran out of tape, the owner of the farm had just had a heart attack and died. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  31:23 
Bus didn't know because he was going in town-- going into town for supplies. So since he was 
gone and the old man died, the son [?rushed?] out and got a mob, and they hid out on each side 
of the road. And when Bus came back... He was driving down the street, and they opened fire on 
him from both sides [sniffs], and he was [?brained out?]. Because the old man told him that he 
couldn't do this as long as he was alive, but the minute he died, to kill Bus [sniffs]. And then that 
didn't satisfy him after they killed Bus. They wanted to go and beat up on his family. After they 
killed him, they came to get the woman and her two small children to beat up on them and the 
sharecropper's wife hid them out [sniffs] and let them have her car and drive into the woods with 
her car and they'd get out and through the night they found their way to our house. 
 
Mary L. Rice  32:39 
Is this--? This isn't your mother's sister. It's your mother's sister in law. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  32:44 
Yes. And they found their way to our house, and my dad was afraid to sneak them out of town. 
He was afraid that the white people would find out, and lynch him. But my two teenage brothers 
wrapped them in blankets and things and put them under some supplies and sneaked them out of 
town into Arkansas, where they could catch a bus and get out of that part of the country. And 
that's the way they kept the white people from beating up on... They wouldn't just go right out 
and lynch them, but they'd just keep coming back and beating them night after night after night.  
 
Mary L. Rice  33:28 
Page 21 of 62 
 
Have you heard about this happening-- I mean, this is the only lynching that you've heard about 
or have any personal experience with, right?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  33:34 
Yes.  
 
Mary L. Rice  33:35 
But had you heard about any--?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  33:36 
I've heard about it, yes.  
 
Mary L. Rice  33:38 
And did they generally go out and beat the family after them? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  33:41 
Right, right. And then his [sniffs] sister, Bus's sister, they found out that she lived in the area, so 
they started going to their house, beating their whole family at night, until they had to sneak out 
of town in the middle of the night to keep them from beating them to death, just because she 
happened to be a sister of a guy [sniffs].  
 
Mary L. Rice  34:07 
Now, this would have been about 1937? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  34:10 
Yes, someplace about [inaudible] '35. Probably in '36 or '37, someplace like there.  
 
Mary L. Rice  34:14 
Why didn't they come to your house if your mother's--? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  34:17 
They didn't know, because my mother was married to a Harris, and they didn't know that she was 
an Ivy. Otherwise, we'd have had trouble [inaudible] my family was at the [inaudible] and be 
beat. 
 
Mary L. Rice  34:31 
[Inaudible]-- 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  34:31 
So they probably would have killed some of us, and some of them would have got killed because 
my-- my brothers. They didn't mess-- they didn't bother white people, but they didn't stand by 
and be hit by one either. [Sniffs.] 
 
Mary L. Rice  34:44 
OK, but none of your none of your brothers were ever-- 
 
Page 22 of 62 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  34:47 
No. 
 
Mary L. Rice  34:48 
--hurt in any way, then? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  34:49 
No. They always minded their own business, stayed out of the way of them, and never let them 
know that-- they never let the white man know that they wouldn't stand for this. But in case 
they'd have ever run into that kind of stuff, they would not stand for it. But the white man didn't 
know that, otherwise they would have, they would have came to see how far they could have got. 
But my brothers was very quiet, minded their own business. And Dad was chicken. He was 
really afraid of them, so he's-- he never [laughs]-- they assumed that the brothers-- I mean, my 
brothers was like my dad, because my-- nobody ever pushed him around, but he never gave them 
any reason to. Because that's why he was afraid to take his relatives out of town, because he was 
scared to death.  
 
Mary L. Rice  35:39 
Well, it certainly is possible that something would have happened to him, but they found a car.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  35:43 
Well, it could have, but the boys figured they was younger and stronger and they had a lot better 
chance of getting a way in. Of course, they were young and didn't have no big responsibilities 
like Dad did, too, so I guess that [inaudible]. 
 
Mary L. Rice  35:56 
Well, tell me about your father. What did he look like?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  36:00 
Oh, he was small, about one half the size of Mama [laughs], and he was reasonably tall, I guess 
around five nine or nine and a half or something. He was slightly taller than [?Mother?]. But he 
was very slender, and the older he got, the slender he got. He never gained him weight. He could 
eat three times as much as Mom. Mom would get fat, he got skinnier [laughs]. And he was 
[inaudible]... I guess he was ambitious, in a way, but he enjoyed seeing that everybody else got 
the work done. He would do it if he had to. [Laughs] But he didn't enjoy [?waiting?] [inaudible]. 
 
Mary L. Rice  36:45 
So your father was more a foreman than a worker?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  36:48 
Right. He was a lot better at telling somebody else what to do than doing it himself. And Mom, 
she would do it. She'd show you exactly how to do it. And then she would take a role-- after she 
taught you, she would take a role in demanding that you keep up. But Dad would pick out the 
fastest one in the line and demand that you keep up with him [laughs].  
 
Mary L. Rice  37:17 
Page 23 of 62 
 
A bit of a different temperament there in the parents.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  37:20 
Yeah. Mama was a go-getter, and Dad was just as happy as somebody getting it and bringing it 
to her [laughs]. 
 
Mary L. Rice  37:36 
Did you have any role models when you were a child? Were there any relatives or your sisters or 
brothers that you really looked up to and tried to model your life after, or your parents?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  37:48 
My [?mother?], my mother. I always wanted to be strong and always wanted to be the leader like 
her. 
 
Mary L. Rice  37:59 
So you knew that your mother was the one that kind of held your family together, and... 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  38:04 
Definitely. 
 
Mary L. Rice  38:07 
How did the Depression affect you, or your family? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  38:10 
Well, with that many of us, I guess we had our own [inaudible] but we learned to survive with it. 
We didn't have a lot, but what then we did have, we made good use of it. 
 
Mary L. Rice  38:29 
OK, so how did you feel compared to other people? I mean, did you hear news about how bad it 
was in other parts of the country? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  38:41 
Yes, heard about soup lines and everything in the big cities and up North. We considered-- and 
we thought we were pretty well off, because at least we could raise part of what we ate, and we 
didn't have to worry about having to have the cash to go out and buy food all the time, because if 
we ran a little low, it was always white neighbors around that we could always go and do chores 
for and get leftovers, and they always had smokehouses and things. So we could always go and 
get some piece of ham, or some ham [inaudible], or [?earn?] some money, put some beans, or 
they would give us something. If they had enough money to pay us, that's fine, but otherwise 
they would pay us off in food and supplies. And sometimes Mom would go in and give out-- she 
would get off of her regular job. She would go-- if we didn't have enough money to get the food 
that she wanted, she would always get up on the weekends and go down and work for some of 
the white neighbors, and that way we could get extra food, enough to have something in the 
house all the time, or something to go along with our vegetables that we had canned and things 
like that. We could always get a meal together like that. And if meal time came up and we didn't 
have anything to get a meal with, it was enough of us to go out and come up with enough food to 
Page 24 of 62 
 
make up a meal. So that way we didn't go hungry like some of the people that had to depend on a 
paycheck or-- and they'd have to go to the store and pay the high priced stuff, because we could 
always go out and and earn something. And on the weekend, the girls if we ran out, the two 
teenage girls, could always go and pick up somebody-- you know, go do somebody's wash, or go 
clean somebody's-- and the boys could always go clean up somebody's yard or something like 
that, or cut some stove wood, because most of the white people burnt coal-- I mean, and wood 
stoves too. And if they went out and cut a load of wood and took it down, the people would 
always pay them for it or give them supplies for it. So that way we--and with that many people 
that was able to work, we could always rustle up [inaudible] up.  
 
Mary L. Rice  38:41 
So you never went hungry?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  40:57 
Very seldom, once in a great while. That once in a while, they would take a load of wood in, and 
just because the white people knew they could get away with it, they wouldn't pay them the full 
price for it. They would have them unloaded it and then tell them that they wasn't going to get all 
that much money. And when we would run into those time, we would just take whatever they 
gave and then they wouldn't take no wood back there anymore. They'd just take wood to the 
other people. And once a guy done that, he wanted a whole cord of wood, and Dad and the boys 
had hauled that wood-- cut that wood, chopped it, and split it up and took it to him. And when he 
gets the cord all delivered and [inaudible], and then he'd pay only half of it. So he went back and 
told the people that we were working for, and they went up and demanded the money. Because 
you couldn't demand nothing from a white man, but he could go back to the white guy that he 
worked for and report it, and then that guy would go up and demand it. So you always had to go 
through somebody, yeah? 
 
Mary L. Rice  42:10 
So it was another case of having to have a white protector?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  42:13 
Yeah, right. In order to get what you had coming, if somebody wanted to be crooked, you had to 
go through another white guy to go up and go collect it for you. [?Because he--?].  
 
Mary L. Rice  42:26 
It sounds like a pretty nerve-wracking system.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  42:29 
It is. It was a very hard way to live. And that's why I got out from down there, because I couldn't 
stand that kind of pressure. 
 
Mary L. Rice  42:38 
[Inaudible] it doesn't sound as though it's that hard for-- I mean, it sounds as though it's easier for 
women.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  42:44 
Page 25 of 62 
 
It was because women could speak their piece, especially to a man. If a white woman done 
something to you way back there, but by the time I was big enough, you could talk back to a 
white woman, you just couldn't hit her, but you could talk back to her. But in Mama's day, in 
Grandma's day, they couldn't even do that much. Mama's day was a lot better than it was in 
Grandma's day. Back when Grandma was a young girl, she wasn't allowed to say anything to 
anybody.  
 
Mary L. Rice  43:12 
Do you have any idea why that would have changed?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  43:14 
Because every generation, everybody-- I think it's because we were getting a little bit further 
from slavery, and we was more of an individual. We had learned to figure out what we could get 
away with and try it. And if somebody found out that they couldn't push you all the time, they're 
not going to try so hard. So we found that it was easier to do just a little, not enough to get 
yourself killed, but just a little, to let them know that you was a human being, too.  
 
Mary L. Rice  43:46 
So you feel that the Blacks just kind of kept pushing the line a little bit.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  43:50 
Just kept pushing a little bit further back. Because otherwise, if we had let them get away with it, 
we would be just like we were the day after slavery stopped.But we had to push back, not enough 
to get hurt, but just enough to let them know, "Gee, you go just a little too far." And the women, 
and then at first the Black women start talking back, and then they start beating up on the white 
men when the white man got out of line, because once upon a time, they could just walk in your 
house and do what they wanted, and you had to stand there and watch it.  
 
Mary L. Rice  44:24 
Do you have any recollections of anybody that you know of did any Black woman physically 
attacking a white man? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  44:32 
Only one, and she didn't have to attack him. She was going to. He came in; they was moving 
away from his sharecropper. 
 
Mary L. Rice  44:40 
Who was this?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  44:42 
My mother. They were moving away from his sharecropper, because they had made the whole 
crop. And see, you had to make the crop, and the white guy sold the stuff, and if he didn't give 
you your half, then you couldn't take your half. You had to move. And the way you got to move-
-  
 
Mary L. Rice  45:03 
Page 26 of 62 
 
So if the sharecropper cheated you, the only recourse you had was to move.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  45:08 
Right. If he decided not to give you your half, it's nothing you could do to get it. But then, if he 
wanted to be dirty, he could try to keep you from moving. So in order to keep, you know, down 
from, you know, starting a big thing, the father would sneak out the night when he found out he 
wasn't going to get his money, he would sneak out the night before, and then he would go to 
another landowner and tell him what this guy done, that he-- that he had no food to feed his 
family through the winter, because this man wouldn't pay him his half of the crop. So if this guy 
was good friend of this other man, he would go over and talk to him. And if he wasn't a good 
friend of this man, he would come over and get your furniture and everything in your family and 
move in to his place, because this man done you a dirty deal. And if he was a good friend, he'd 
go over and talk to this man and try to make him give you your half from the crop. And if not, he 
would just-- he-- if he needed somebody, he would come and get your family. So in order to 
keep the white man from coming in and jumping on the Black man, the Black man would go 
away and stay, and then he leave his wife and his family there, because he figured the white guy 
wouldn't bother his wife and family until this other man came to get them. But in this case, this 
guy decided to come over and make Mom and the big kids get out in the field. And Mom was 
packing. She said, "Well, we-- we're not going to go out now." Was just the last little part of the 
crop where you had to pull.  
 
Mary L. Rice  46:58 
Now, he already knew that you were leaving?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  47:00 
Uh-huh. The thing is, when he came in, he knew that they was-- would have been out in the 
field, but when they wasn't in the field, he came in and found her putting stuff in boxes and stuff. 
So he gets mad and grabs a bed slat -- because they'd already took the bed down and rolled up 
the mattresses and stuff -- and he grabs a bed slat and tells her and the boys, if they didn't get out 
in that field, he was going to beat the so-and-so out of her. And the boys was out in the backyard 
putting the chickens and things in boxes. But when he grabbed this bed slat to hit Mom with, 
Mom gets a butcher knife and my older sister ran for the boys, because [?Lou?] wasn't in the 
backyard, it was out in the barnyard, where they was packing up the chickens and stuff. And my 
teenage brother come running through the door and smashed the door open and reached for the 
shotgun, and he ran. 
 
Mary L. Rice  48:00 
Now, what was to keep him from getting a lynch mob and coming back and getting your 
brother?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  48:03 
They was [?going?] too soon. And teenage boys, as long as he didn't shoot one of them or hit one 
of them, they wasn't as hard on teenage boys as they was grown men, but he might have tried 
something. But, why, when he ran, by the time he got back to the house -- he told me he was 
going back get a shotgun. And Walter told him, "You bring all the shotguns down here you want 
to, but if you stick your head through this door, I'm gonna blow it off." So by this time, when he 
Page 27 of 62 
 
ran back to the house, he decided that wasn't what he wanted. And then in about half an hour, 
these other people came down in the trucks.  
 
Mary L. Rice  48:39 
The other white people [crosstalk].  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  48:40 
The other white people. And he brought-- this white man brought his teenage white boys, and 
they both was sitting on each side of the truck with shotguns. So they came in and loaded all of 
that stuff. Walter [?and Ernest Albert?], my brothers, loaded this stuff in the trucks and took all 
the kids and everything and pulled out. And they just whooping and yelling, the two white boys, 
"I wish some [?Pepperwood?] would come out here so I could blow him in!" [Laughs] And 
nobody opened the door. But otherwise, the boy-- the two-- my two teenage brothers were-- had 
to protect the house. But by these people coming, and Dad wouldn't even come along, because he 
knew what they would be doing. So he didn't know that the man would be in the house and all, 
he just [inaudible] he knew he'd be mad. And he took them all over. And when you got a 
[?mean?] family to protect you they [?don't?] mess with you.  
 
Mary L. Rice  49:42 
[?Except?] that family could pretty well mess with you without much interference if they wanted 
to.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  49:48 
What? That-- those teenage boys?  
 
Mary L. Rice  49:52 
Yeah. I mean, once you-- well--  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  49:55 
No, when they found out what Walter [?and Ernest Albert?] done, they decided they didn't want 
to deal with Walter [?and Ernest Albert?] because Walter and [inaudible] was bigger than they 
was. And they knew they were stronger, so they got along fine. He just moved them out. We 
moved about 10 miles away. But then after that, Mom saved up enough money to pay down on a 
home [inaudible].  
 
Mary L. Rice  50:18 
That couldn't have been very easy for her to do.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  50:21 
[Sniffs] No, you really had to... But she knew if she didn't save it while all those big kids were 
there working -- they weren't going to be there forever -- so she started sneaking a few dollars 
over in the corner. Back in those days, it wasn't very expensive to pay down on a farm. You 
could-- if you had $25 or $30, you could pay down on land, as long as it wasn't right on a 
highway. The land right on the highway was expensive, but when you get back two or three 
miles off the highway, land was dirt cheap.  
 
Page 28 of 62 
 
Mary L. Rice  50:53 
But how much money would they made? I mean, like, for a cord of wood, how much would an--
? I mean, in your earliest recollection, how much would a cord of wood have cost?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  51:02 
About $5. 
 
Mary L. Rice  51:03 
And how long would, you know, let's say, four men have to work to get a cord of wood?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  51:08 
Well my brothers was pretty strong workers, and my two older sisters used to work right along 
with them, so they could cut two cords of wood and split it in [?less than?] a day.  
 
Mary L. Rice  51:18 
So they made $10 a day.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  51:20 
[Inaudible] and that was all--  
 
Mary L. Rice  51:22 
And then they had to eat off that. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  51:25 
Well, let's see, $10 would feed a-- even our big family for a week.  
 
Mary L. Rice  51:31 
OK. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  51:32 
[?That's 'cause food?] was very cheap. Five and ten cents a pound. Eggs used to be 10¢ a dozen. 
And if you got-- if you went to a farm to get it, you could get it less than that.  
 
Mary L. Rice  51:41 
Well, of course, she would have had her own chickens, too, wouldn't she? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  51:45 
Mm-hmm. But sometimes-- 
 
Mary L. Rice  51:47 
So how much would you [crosstalk]--? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  51:47 
--chickens don't lay 12 months out of the year. 
 
Mary L. Rice  51:50 
Page 29 of 62 
 
Oh, they don't? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  51:50 
Unh-uh. In the wintertime-- 
 
Mary L. Rice  51:52 
[Crosstalk]-- 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  51:53 
No, but-- yeah, but that's because these people had special farms. But in the wintertime when you 
haven't got this much green grass and the abundant supply of grain, chickens stop laying for 
about two months, or sometimes three.  
 
Mary L. Rice  52:08 
Oh, so then she went to the farm to buy eggs.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  52:11 
Well, most of the time, we'd get by without eggs. But we didn't have powdered meats and things 
like that, but we did have powdered milk. By the time I was 8 or 10, they had powdered milk. 
[?Commodities or something?] used to send it to the schools. 
 
Mary L. Rice  52:39 
Oh, so you had milk in school? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  52:43 
Uh-huh. We started getting milk in school when I was about 9 or 10. They would bring this 
powdered milk in and we would fix it up. And then everybody would get to carry a box home, 
one box a week per kid. 
 
Mary L. Rice  52:58 
That must have been [crosstalk].  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  53:00 
In a big family, we would sell some our powdered milk for other things that we needed. And by 
that time, it was during the [inaudible] it was wartime. 'Cause that's when they started 
supplementing the poor people's allowance. 
 
Mary L. Rice  53:14 
Oh, that's good.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  53:15 
And that way we would-- 
 
Mary L. Rice  53:17 
So, was this [inaudible]? 
 
Page 30 of 62 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  53:18 
We had stamps. No, the stamps. You'd have to-- you could-- I don't care how much money you 
had. You couldn't buy fresh meat, and you couldn't buy lard, and you couldn't buy a lot of coffee, 
and you couldn't buy sugar. You had to have stamps. 
 
Mary L. Rice  53:31 
So, these things were [crosstalk]. They were rationed. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  53:33 
Yes, it was rationed. So they-- for a family our size, we would get a lot more stamps than we had 
money to buy stuff, so we would sell stamps. 
 
Mary L. Rice  53:44 
Oh, so you made money. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  53:45 
Uh-huh.  
 
Mary L. Rice  53:46 
Oh, I see. I thought you had to buy those stamps.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  53:49 
No, they issued those stamps. You go to the post office every month and pick up your 
[inaudible], and you got so much for each kid. And then our family, we had so many kids. So we 
got more. And nobody in my family drank coffee. And people-- coffee drinkers were just crazy 
to get coffee.  
 
Mary L. Rice  54:09 
So would white people buy your stamps?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  54:11 
Oh, boy, would they ever.  
 
Mary L. Rice  54:12 
Oh, is that who would you sell them? Or would you sell them to other Blacks? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  54:14 
No, we would sell them at the store. And if we went to the store and some of our friends were 
there that wanted some then we would sell them to them. But what we would do, we would take 
them to the store and exchange them for something else we needed. 
 
Mary L. Rice  54:28 
Oh, so you didn't sell them to anybody directly. You sold it to the owner of the store, right? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  54:33 
Page 31 of 62 
 
Right. The owner of the store, if we didn't get-- found somebody that could afford them -- see, 
we would sell them-- we didn't sell them for a lot, but we sold them for enough to get us the 
other things that we needed. We didn't drink coffee, but we did need lard. We did need salt pork 
and stuff like this. And when we needed this stuff, we would go to the store and they could sell 
them for big money, probably. They probably bought them from us for 10¢ and sold them for $3. 
But what we were doing was trying to even out our grocery bill.  
 
Mary L. Rice  55:07 
So your family did a lot of bartering, [?actually?]. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  55:11 
Uh-huh.  
 
Mary L. Rice  55:11 
Not only with those stamps, um... Yeah, with those stamps, but, you know, with services and 
[crosstalk]. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  55:17 
Uh-huh. We had to, because we didn't have a lot of money. And with this many people, it took a 
lot of food to feed us. But we weren't choosy, so we would eat reasonably priced food, but we'd 
still try to make sure that we had enough basic food. We didn't try to fill the family up with meat, 
but we always had meat to season the vegetables with. And then when we had these stamps to 
buy all of this meat, we didn't need that much meat, so we would switch the stamps around and 
get the money to buy the other things that we did need.  
 
Mary L. Rice  55:49 
Tell me what kind of food you ate. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  55:52 
Oh, we had a lot of beans, and we also had canned green beans. We would dry our own beans 
and peas and lima beans. 
 
Mary L. Rice  56:02 
How do beans grow?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  56:04 
[?They call?] cow beans, [?got crowd of?] peas and-- well, this is something that the average city 
person isn't accustomed to [crosstalk]--  
 
Mary L. Rice  56:15 
How do beans grow? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  56:17 
They grow in the field.  
 
Mary L. Rice  56:20 
Page 32 of 62 
 
Well, I mean, you know, like potatoes grow under the ground-- 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  56:22 
Well, [?greens?]-- 
 
Mary L. Rice  56:22 
How do they grow? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  56:23 
--[?was always on the vine?]. Beans and peas grow [?tall?]. Peas [?rods?] and so you plant peas 
in with corn, so they have something to climb up on. And then they pick the corn [inaudible] the 
stalk if you can harvest corn off of that. But you don't plant it out where you're making a full 
crop, because it's starch in corn. So you plant it where you're going to have your fresh corn from. 
So while the peas is climbing up there, the corn will still come up where you can can cook and 
eat fresh corn. But 
 
Mary L. Rice  56:58 
I just like what they call a truck patch?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  56:59 
Uh-huh.  
 
Mary L. Rice  57:00 
Why would they call it a truck patch?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  57:02 
Oh, you call it truck patch because it's not your garden itself, but it's similar to your garden. It's-- 
a truck patch is something that you don't sell from, you feed your family on it.  
 
Mary L. Rice  57:12 
What's the difference between a truck patch and a garden?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  57:14 
Well, the garden is usually more... I mean, it's not as big, number one. See, a truck patch can be 
an acre or two acres, and a garden is usually fenced in, and that's something that you plant turnip 
greens and cabbage and collards and things that will grow all year, so you got to keep it fenced in 
to keep the cattle away from it. Because once your crop is harvest, then you turn your cattle in to 
finish up the leftover stalks and stuff of your crop. And that's why they call this a truck patch, 
because if you don't can or-- and put a-- dry and put away all of this stuff, then you turn your 
cattle and your hogs out into the property, and then they go and finish up. Like, if you leave 
some potatoes, then you-- 
 
Mary L. Rice  58:01 
So you can save money on feed, too?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  58:03 
Page 33 of 62 
 
Right. And then if you don't need all of this, you just turn your cattle out and your pigs out. The 
pigs will dig up the potatoes and eat them, and that's their food supply, so you haven't got to feed 
them. And then you turn your cattle loose, and they go out and scavenge through the corn fields 
and things and the peas and stuff like that. Then you don't have to feed them as much. So this 
way you sort of stretching your food supply.  
 
Mary L. Rice  58:26 
OK, so you would have fields that were cash crops.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  58:29 
Right.  
 
Mary L. Rice  58:29 
And then you'd have a truck patch that you would-- 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  58:31 
Private. 
 
Mary L. Rice  58:32 
--have your winter supply of food on. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  58:33 
Uh-huh.  
 
Mary L. Rice  58:34 
And then you would have a garden that would be your immediate supply. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  58:37 
Right. You ate out of your garden all the time. And then in the wintertime, you usually had 
turnip greens and collard greens and mustard greens. Mustard greens would get frozen around 
before Christmastime. But even if the top of the turnips got frozen, but if they're nice and strong, 
you plant them early enough if they're winter through, then you can go push the snow back and 
dig it out. And the turnips under the ground. When the tops start to freeze, all you got to do is 
rake a little hay in over your turnips and your turnips and carrots is there for the winter. You can 
go out there and harvest all year. Then when you eat up your supply of canned foods if you got, 
then you go back to your garden and you took fresh vegetables. Rake the hay away and dig down 
and get your vegetables out that's not [?frozen?] yet. And when you got a big family, you got to 
look out for those months that you can't run out to the garden and get everything. You got to 
have that stuff stored away. And we also had cellars where you could put-- 
 
Mary L. Rice  59:42 
Had what? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  59:42 
Cellars.  
 
Page 34 of 62 
 
Mary L. Rice  59:43 
Cellars?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  59:44 
Uh-huh. Something like if you dig a hole in the ground, and then you cover it over with wood, 
and then you can put hay over the top of it, that way you could keep potatoes. You can keep 
apples for three months. You can keep fruits and vegetables down in there. It won't freeze, yet 
it's cold enough to keep it fresh. It's like a refrigerator. Because when we were small, we didn't 
have refrigerators because we didn't have electricity. So this way you had your sort of 
[crosstalk]-- 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:00:13 
[Crosstalk] have an icebox?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:00:14 
Later on. But when we were kids, we didn't have anything because we couldn't afford anything 
like that.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:00:20 
Oh, didn't you have a cellar under the house?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:00:23 
Sometimes, but most of the times the uner the house cellar gets too warm, so you used to have 
this out back of the house, maybe out to the side of the chicken coop or something like that. And 
then this way, you just put hay over the top of it, and then you put the wood on so the rats, you 
know, the wood rats and things wouldn't dig down. And then you could go there, open this up 
and and have fruits and vegetables [?all ready?]. And nuts and things like that. Walnuts, we used 
to gather black walnuts. They used to grow wild. [?But we'd have all of this stuff down there.?] 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:00:59 
So you would go out and gather things in addition to.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:01:01 
Oh, yeah. We would pick blackberries and can them. We picked dewberries and canned them. 
And we'd go in the [?falls?] when the berries [inaudible] they get ripe. On Sunday afternoon, 
sometimes it'd be 5 or 10 of us with big two gallon buckets, and we'd go out and come back in 
with 8 or 10 gallons of blackberries. And somebody would carry a couple of hoes to kill the 
snakes.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:01:26 
There were a lot of snakes? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:01:27 
Oh, yeah, all kinds. Then you-- somebody would watch for snakes while the others picked 
berries. But for 10 kids, we could pick 10 gallons of berries in three or four hours. And then we 
Page 35 of 62 
 
just-- Sunday afternoon after we got in from church, we'd just go out and harvest the berries. And 
we were looking out for food.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:01:48 
All the time.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:01:49 
Uh-huh. We had to with 12-- when you make 12 meals, that's a big [?hump?] out of a flour 
barrel. And we always bought our flour by the 100 pounds. We bought our flour by the 100 
pounds [inaudible] by the bushels. And Mama did baking powder by the quart or the half a 
gallon. [Inaudible]-- [tape cuts]. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:02:08 
This April 29th, eight o'clock, interview with Dorothy Turner, interview one, tape two, side one. 
OK. Now, before the last tape ended, you were telling me that you bought food in mass 
quantities. What kind of food did you eat? What-- did you eat a lot of boiled foods, or...?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:02:34 
Yes. Beans, greens, turnips. Then occasionally stews, but mostly just vegetable that's seasoned 
with small amounts of meat, just enough to season it. So we basically had homemade bread, but 
this wasn't the professional type. It was cornbread and biscuits.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:03:03 
Oh, quick breads.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:03:03 
Yes, we very seldom ever used yeast. Used baking powder and baking soda for most of our 
breads. And we had hot bread almost every meal because we freshly cooked them-- baked them. 
And our basic diet was lots of vegetables and seasonings with the meat instead of roast and 
things like we have a lot now, but on special occasions, we'd have a baked ham or chicken and 
dumplings or stuffed duck. We usually had stuffed chickens instead of turkeys, because for some 
reason, our farm, we didn't raise turkeys. We used a rooster, which was almost the size of a 
medium sized turkey, and that was for our special occasions.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:03:53 
What would be a special occasion?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:03:55 
Oh, if we had guests or Sundays. Every Sunday, we would have a special meal, usually chicken 
and dumplings or fried chicken or something like that.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:04:04 
Who would you have for guests?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:04:06 
Page 36 of 62 
 
Oh, the church people. The preacher, he would come over about once or twice a month that 
loved to eat all the chicken and save the gravy for us kids. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:04:20 
Your parents would let him eat all [inaudible]?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:04:22 
Oh, as long as they were guests. They thought it was rude to tell somebody not to eat it all, but if 
it had been me, I would only put a little bit on the table for him, because at that time, we weren't 
allowed to eat with the guests. The kids ate after. The parents and the guests ate first, and then us 
kids would eat last. But if we had a preacher that was greedy and we only cooked two chickens, 
it wouldn't be much left for us when we when time came for us-- 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:04:51 
What did you have to eat?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:04:53 
Gravy and the vegetables and rice or whatever, mashed potatoes, or whatever.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:04:59 
So tell me how you feel about preachers.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:05:02 
I would never invite one to my house if that's what I had to feed you--  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:05:06 
[Laughs.]  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:05:06 
--because in my house, if I had children, my kids would eat with everybody else or they wouldn't 
eat. That's the way I feel about it. But back in those days--  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:05:15 
Is that what you did with your kids?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:05:16 
Right. My-- when I set the table, my kid's plate was the first one set because she came first, as far 
as I was concerned. But back in those days, your kids weren't suppo-- it was bad etiquette if you 
brought your kids to the table. Your kids had to eat after your guests finished, and if the guests 
ate it all, the kids didn't get much.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:05:40 
So you didn't have-- were there a lot of guests that year?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:05:43 
Page 37 of 62 
 
Not very much. We couldn't afford much guests, because basically we was all-- all of us was 
busy keeping food in our mouths, so we had company very seldom. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:05:57 
Did you have many relatives living in the area? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:06:01 
Yes, but we weren't the type of relatives that just practically lived in each other's house. We 
would go visit each other, and when we went over, we ate whatever they had on hand. But when 
you had-- when your guests-- when your relatives dropped in, they wasn't considered guests. 
They were just part of your people. And they ate-- you didn't cook special things, because 9 
times out of 10 you didn't even know when they was coming until they drove up in the driveway. 
And then this way, whatever we had, we shared it equally, and a relative wouldn't sit down to the 
table and eat all of anything up from the kids. We was-- I don't know. Relatives are more 
intelligent than guests sometimes [laughs]. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:06:43 
At least they [inaudible].  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:06:45 
They were more considerate, anyway, because [inaudible]-- they had kids of their own, but if 
they came in and we only had two chickens there, nobody would sit down and pile their plate up. 
Everybody would take-- they would see how much was there and try to take an equal share. And 
if it wasn't a whole piece for everybody, they didn't mind cutting off a piece. And if their kids 
were sitting at the table, they took a piece of meat and shared their meat with some of their kids. 
And this way, they filled up on vegetables like we did. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:07:14 
So there-- even though you were poor, you were still hospitable, too.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:07:19 
Right, right. And when we-- we would never think of sitting down eating with anybody in the 
house and not offering them food. Whatever we had, everybody would go in and eat, but we 
would all-- I mean, when we had guests, we-- I mean, relatives, we all could eat at the same 
table. So we could all eat--  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:07:35 
Oh, so the children got to eat at the same time. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:07:36 
Right. The kids ate at the same time, simply because we had fixed food for one family, and there 
was two families to feed. So when the family would drop in, they would take a piece of chicken 
or a piece of roast or a piece of ham, and then they would divide it around with their children so 
that it would be equally for everybody.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:07:56 
Page 38 of 62 
 
Did you hunt, too?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:07:57 
Yes.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:07:58 
Did you ever hunt, or-- 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:08:00 
Mm-hmm. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:08:00 
--was it-- was that something that the boys did?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:08:02 
Oh no, that's-- in our family, there was no such thing as a girl's job and a boy's job. The boys 
done everything -- Mom made sure that all of the boys knew how to cook, wash, and iron, and 
look after children. Diapers, wash the diapers, and everything, like-- and diaper the kids, like 
everybody else did.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:08:23 
Did they have to do that, though?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:08:25 
Yes, the boys had to learn how to do everything. We would do it mostly during the week, and on 
the weekends the boys would take them-- would get in there and learn. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:08:40 
They learned to do it. But did they actually have-- 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:08:42 
They didn't have-- 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:08:43 
--the responsibility to take care of [crosstalk]?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:08:44 
They didn't have to do it by themselves most of the time, unless they happen to be the biggest kid 
in the family that weren't big enough to go to work.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:08:52 
Was there an instance of that happening?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:08:54 
Page 39 of 62 
 
Yes, because before I was big enough to run the whole place, James -- he was three years older 
than me -- he would have to oversee. And if I couldn't do a decent job diapering the baby, he 
would have to finish. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:09:09 
Well, what-- OK, so you and James... Now this was when you were about how old?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:09:14 
Oh, I guess I was about six when James-- when I first started being left there and I weren't big 
enough to reach the stove to cook properly, so James had to stay and help. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:09:27 
OK, but so it was your responsibility to do the work but he was there to oversee, or...?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:09:31 
Well, it was hi-- though he had to see that the work got done and finish training me, I guess is 
what it amounted to, because he would have to do what I couldn't do, and then he had other 
things to do, too, that I weren't big enough to do, like bringing in the wood and chopping the 
wood while I was looking after the little kids. But at that time, when the other kids weren't big 
enough to look after themselves, and I-- being six years old, I weren't quite big enough to take 
care of all of them, so he would have to help.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:10:03 
So how many children were there when [inaudible] that had to be taken care of?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:10:06 
Well, there was three real small ones, and then my sister Jobie was always as big as me, but very 
immature. So she would-- she had to be taken care of just like the three little ones because she 
wasn't capable of looking after herself or we'd have to protect the little ones from her [sniffs]. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:10:29 
[?Protect them from her?]?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:10:30 
She was a rowdy kid. She beat up on the little boy that was next to her. For some reason, she had 
a grudge with him. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:10:37 
So how much younger was he than Jobie? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:10:41 
Three and a half years, and Jobie would beat up on him every chance she got, so I'd have to 
protect him from Jobie. And was almost as big as me, so it wasn't an easy job, and--  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:10:54 
So you would have to fight with Jobie?  
Page 40 of 62 
 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:10:56 
Yeah. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:10:56 
[?What about if?] James was there?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:10:58 
When James was there-- when I was real small, James was there. So he would step in when Jobie 
would start getting really rowdy and get a stick or something to keep me from hurting her, 
because I wasn't going to sit there and let Jobie hurt me. I was nice to Jobie if I could be, 
otherwise I could get a little dirty. I was taught survival [laughs] at a early age. So when James, 
he would have to help, and then he'd have to help control Jobie, because Jobie was almost as big 
as me, but fortunately, I was the stronger one and definitely the smarter one [laughs]. 'Cause she 
didn't think as far ahead as I did. And then, and then James got a little better hand at knowing 
these things and doing these things than some of the other boys around, because they went out to 
the fields, because the girls was almost their age, but by him being quite a bit older than me. And 
then once I learned where I could handle it by myself, then he was big enough to go out into the 
fields, because from 12 years old on, they could earn a full day's pay. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:12:05 
Were they working in your own fields or working in somebody else's?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:12:08 
Oh no, working in somebody else's field. Because when they were working in our field, unless 
we had a real small baby, everybody worked.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:12:15 
Oh, so you would have to work in the fields, too?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:12:17 
Right. And--  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:12:18 
So what happens when you came home then?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:12:19 
But then when I was home taking care of the babies, that's usually when they was out there 
working. But I still had to work in our garden and truck patches with-- even with all the babies. 
And with James there, I didn't have to do as much out there, because he would fill in by-- in the 
truck patches and things, because he'd rather do that than diaper and watch and wash clothes. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:12:39 
Well, tell me, what did you have to do? I mean--  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:12:45 
Page 41 of 62 
 
When I was home? I had to take care of the three--  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:12:49 
Well, let's start from, like, sunup to sundown. So you get up in the morning and you're seven 
years old?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:12:55 
Well, no, when I get up in the morning, the big people were there. They were getting up, fixing 
breakfast and stuff. I didn't have to do that.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:13:00 
Oh, OK. But when you [crosstalk]-- 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:13:01 
I had to [?pick?] [crosstalk]--  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:13:02 
--were seven years old or eight years-- 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:13:04 
I was seven years old when I started being left home alone, but I was six years old when James 
and I-- 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:13:09 
Right, OK. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:13:10 
--was being left home.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:13:10 
So now everybody's getting up and... 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:13:12 
And getting breakfast.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:13:14 
And there are still big people home--  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:13:16 
Yeah, the big people's [inaudible]--  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:13:17 
--so they get the breakfast-- 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:13:18 
So they get the breakfast.  
Page 42 of 62 
 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:13:19 
--and what do you do?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:13:20 
I get up and fix my-- I only had to fix myself because the girl that used to run the household was 
there to take care of the little baby. And Mom, after the baby was was two or three months old, 
he was our babies, not Mom, because the family was so big that everybody raised everybody 
else. So this way, Mom didn't have to be responsible for all of them. So Mom would get up and 
get herself ready, and if the-- one of the kids that weren't big enough to quite button his shoes, or 
tie his shoes, or button his shirt, or something, she'd give him a little hand while she was getting 
ready. But basically, Mom was a guest in her own house whenever she could be, because she 
would get up in the morning, because at late at night, because 9 times out of 10 it was a nursing 
baby in the house, so she would have to nursing late, so she could get the rest of her sleep, and 
this way, she'd get to sleep a little earlier than-- a little later than most of us, because after she 
had to get up in the middle of night, the rest of us went to bed at sundown and slept until 
daylight. We had to be up before the sun, but we didn't-- at least got to sleep until daylight, but 
she would have to get up and take care of the little baby during the night. That was her baby at 
night, and our baby during the day. So then, after I was big enough to take care of the whole kid-
- I mean, the whole-- the little ones at home, I would have to work in the garden, wash diapers, 
feed those kids lunch -- and lunch consisted of going out in the garden and gathering the 
vegetables and cooking them for them, because we didn't have many leftovers, because with 12 
people, the leftovers left [?what they did?]. So [inaudible] for a meal. And then I had to go out in 
the garden, but at that time, I weren't big enough to milk the cows, so they would leave the milk. 
They would get the milk and bring it in. And I didn't have to milk the cows, because the cow was 
so big I couldn't reach in my chest [laughs]. I weren't strong enough to squeeze hard enough. But 
anyway, when James used to stay, he used to have to. But after that, one of the boys or one of the 
big girls would milk before they left, so that they would have milk in the house for the babies. 
But it was up to me to cook them something, feed them lunch, have all the dirty diapers washed. 
And sometimes it was two in diapers at one time, so I had to have that all washed. When they got 
home, the diapers had to be washed, the house had to be clean-- 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:15:50 
How did you wash? How did you wash? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:15:51 
[?A rug?] board and an old fashioned tub. And go down the hill and bring the water up to the 
house to wash it, or take the whole family down there and wash by the pond. So it was a matter 
of transporting the whole family down there or bringing the water up to here. So when James 
was there, we would bring the water up to here, because it was two of us. But after it was just me 
alone, I tagged the whole mob, and we'd go down to the spring [laughs].  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:16:22 
So you would have, what, two babies and...?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:16:24 
Page 43 of 62 
 
Two babies and two big kids. And I would go down to the spring, and the second kid would 
watch the babies. Jobie wouldn't watch nobody but Jobie. So I'd have [?Sonny?] watched Elmer 
and Cardie.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:16:44 
How old was he?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:16:46 
Oh, gosh, he was very small, about three.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:16:49 
You'd have a three--  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:16:50 
I'd have a three year old watching the little babies. At least a snake couldn't crawl up on them. He 
would stand there with a stick [laughs]. [Inaudible] snake came, he wasn't afraid of snakes. He 
would [inaudible] them and run them away. So he would watch the little babies while I got the 
water up and got it into the tub, and then they'd all be right in the front of me, where I could see 
them while I washed. And then I-- once I washed-- I packed the diapers and baby clothes in two 
buckets, and then we would put a stick between them. And we-- Jobie and I would carry the 
clothes back, and I'd have a baby on the hip and the bucket [laughs] the broom handle in the 
other hand. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:17:33 
Carry them back where?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:17:34 
Back up to the line. The lines was up at the house. And then we took the clothes back up and 
hang them out. And then I'd have to bring water to do the cooking for lunch, and we'd all come 
down. If I could get the babies to sleep, then I'd take Jobie and me, we'd go down and get water, 
but I couldn't leave Jobie with the babies.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:17:55 
Would she hurt them, or was she just irresponsible?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:17:58 
She was irresponsible, and if the baby woke up or got strangled or something, she wouldn't pay 
any attention. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:18:04 
Did anything ever happen to the babies while you were taking care of them? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:18:07 
Yeah, one time I was out hanging up the clothes up. We got the clothes up to the house. I got the 
babies to sleep and put them in the bed, and I forgot to watch Jobie for a minute, and she went in 
Page 44 of 62 
 
and started a fire in the middle of the living room. Wadded up paper and everything she could 
find, and got her a good fire started. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:18:28 
Why would she do that?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:18:30 
I don't know, just mischief. And [?Sonny?], thank goodness he was there. He come running 
because my back was-- 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:18:36 
So this was a three year old.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:18:37 
Yeah. He come running to tell me, why, because my back was to the house, the house would 
have been falling in, the babies burned up before I realized it. He come running and told me that 
Jobie was burning the house down, and I had to go back. And I grabbed a bucket of water and 
ran back. And when I threw the water over the fire, Jobie jumped on me, so I knocked Jobie 
down, and I ran back for more water, and I came back the next time to throw the water to-- on 
the fire, she was right back on me again. I was putting out her pretty fine. So I got smart, and I 
would come in, throw the water, hit Jobie with the bucket [laughs], and come back and [?get?] 
[inaudible] [laughs].  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:19:21 
I take it you got the fire out.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:19:22 
I got the fire out because I got smart, because while I'm fighting Jobie, the house was burning 
down [laughs].  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:19:30 
So was there very much damage?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:19:31 
Just-- we had hardwood floors. We didn't have-- not hardwood. They were just wood. So it 
burned a little bit, but I got some lye and the broom and scrubbed it so it didn't make no hole. I 
got the water on fast. It was mostly just smoke and little charred on the top. But I got the butcher 
knife and scraped the charred part down and bleached it out pretty good. But boy Jobie got tarred 
and feathered when Mom got home, but meanwhile, she had a few [laughs] bucket marks before 
Mom got home, because that was the only way I could get the fire out, because Jobie was almost 
as big as me, and I didn't have time to be [inaudible] [laughs] rifling around I-- after the second 
bucket, I figured out if I hit her with the bucket first, I kept her out of the way while I got the fire 
out [laughs]. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:20:30 
Page 45 of 62 
 
OK. Were there any other instances? I mean, was it dangerous leaving children that small alone 
in the house? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:20:39 
Yes, but it wasn't so-- so dangerous, because we didn't have the type of conflict down in there 
that we have now, because we was completely off the road. And if anybody came up to the 
house, he was headed just for our house. And back then the most people-- stranger that you ever 
seen was the Watkins Man or something like that, trying to sell stuff. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:21:02 
Did you have any other kind of protection? Did you have a gun? Did you have--? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:21:05 
I had guns, but at six years old, I didn't know how to use them.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:21:08 
Was there a dog there?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:21:10 
Yes, we had two dogs, but nobody came in the yard. No stranger came in the yard. And that way, 
we got protection from that that way. But then we had to protect ourselves against the snakes, 
and--  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:21:22 
Were there any other kind of predators around [inaudible]? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:21:24 
Yes, there was mad dogs. We had dogs that had rabies back in those days, people didn't get-- 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:21:31 
Was there a lot of dogs then?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:21:32 
Quite a few, but most of them was on the public highway. But once in a while they would get off 
the highway and get on a regular little dirt road, the little road that we used to come in and out. 
And I remember one time when I was about, oh, I must have been about five, we heard the dogs 
raising Cain, and we looked out. We was out playing, and looked up, and here was this great big 
dog, and we had two dogs, but it's something about a dog with rabies, his-- something about that 
knocks other dogs out. They can only fight him a few minutes, and then they fall over for a 
while, few minutes. And this dog was fight-- I mean, we was going to put both dogs in the house, 
because when we would hear him raising Cain and we'd look out and see this dog foaming at the 
mouth, we would put our dogs in the house, but we had one sister that was stubborn. She flatly 
refused to run and get in the house, you know, so the dog couldn't get to her. So we took the dogs 
in the house, and we realized that she was going to get bitten by this rabies dog. And back in 
those days, we had to pay $18 a shot to get those rabies shot, and she didn't have it because we 
couldn't afford it. So when Mom seen that the dog-- it just happened to be a Sunday afternoon, 
Page 46 of 62 
 
and everybody was home, and when mom seen that the dog was going to bite her, she let the 
other two dogs out, because with a mad dog, it took two dogs to control it, because when one 
would fall over, then he would get away and bite somebody. And Florance stood up there and 
waited until the dog got almost to her and then she decided to walk to the house. The dog was 
foaming at the mouth, and she was going to walk. So Mom let the dogs out, so we had to kill 
both dogs, because that was the only way to save Florance's life, was to let them keep the mad 
dog off of her. So when she started walking out, Mom let the dogs out, let both the dogs jump 
this dog. And every time one would fall over, then the other one would take over, and this way, 
we kept him off of Florance until Florance walked to the house because she wouldn't run. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:23:43 
Anything happen with Florance?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:23:45 
She wasn't very smart, either, but at least the dogs didn't get to bite her. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:23:51 
Well, I mean, what did your mother have to say to her?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:23:54 
She didn't. Florance walked in the house, she backhanded her a few times [laughs], but still, she 
saved her life. She wouldn't let the dogs get to her. But we had to shoot the dogs. And one, the 
female, had little puppies, and we tied her--  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:24:13 
You had to shoot the dogs because they would be rabid?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:24:16 
Yeah, in two-- I think it's two weeks, they'll go mad. So we had planned to kill them that night, 
so we tied them-- I mean, that the next day, so we tied them up that night in case that dog came 
back, since they weren't mad yet, and we put the little puppies in the little pen, but [?Flora?] -- 
that was the female dog -- the little puppy started crying for food, and she broke her loose and 
got to the puppy. So we had to kill the whole... It was six little little puppies. We had to kill them 
all, because she got to them and let them nurse. She broke loose. Because if we killed her, then 
we could have saved the little puppies. But as it was, she got to the little puppies to let them 
nurse and the next morning we woke up, she was in with the puppies. So we had to kill all the 
little puppies and her and the big dog. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:25:05 
How did they kill them?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:25:06 
Shoot the others and drown the babies. She took a pail of water and drowned them on the inside. 
Because they were so little, we just didn't have nowhere to beat them to death. So we just 
drowned them, got a bucket of water, pail of water [sniffs]. 
 
Page 47 of 62 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:25:28 
So then did you have to buy dogs? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:25:30 
No, you can always get dogs free, because people, you know, always have dogs was having 
puppies. So we got two little puppies and raised them up and named them [?Taman?] and 
[?Naman?] [laughs], and he grew up-- and he grew up, and we kept him till, I think-- we-- 
[?Naman?] ran away after a while, but we kept [?Taman?] until he died. He was about 16 years 
old. [Inaudible]-- 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:26:00 
So you-- usually, your parents usually tried to keep dogs there, though. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:26:04 
Yeah, keep dogs for protection with the kids around, you know. It wasn't safe for-- and not only 
that, if a rabies dog came on the property and-- with the little kids out playing, you know, it 
could have bit any of us. But as long as we had a couple of grown dogs, nothing got to us. They 
protect us from anything, nobody. And when the Watkins man came out, he didn't get out of the 
car until we went out and called those dogs off. Nobody put their toe on that property until we 
called the dogs back. But they would mind. When we called, they came right back. But man get 
out of the car or anybody, anybody get out of the car, when we were there, it was them and those 
dogs. So they protected us kids. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:26:53 
Well that's [inaudible]. And you mentioned a while ago that there were a lot of snakes when you 
had to carry something. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:26:59 
Yeah, we carried-- when we were going out in the woods or down to the spring or anything in 
the snake season, we always carried a hoe or something. Or one of the little kids would carry the 
hoe if we had two pails of water or something to carry up, then the little kids would always drag 
a hoe along. And they were trained from babies. It would just natural for them to reach and get 
something, a stick or a hoe, to go because, I mean, that was survival, and I mean it was just as 
normal as walking out there with your car keys, now. You've gotten used to protecting yourself. 
And then when you, [?uh?], you had a big, wide path or something like that, you would just carry 
a stick or something, because most snakes would not chase you, except in the spring, we had 
blue racers that loved to chase people [crosstalk]. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:27:51 
[Crosstalk?] 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:27:53 
I don't know why. [Crosstalk]-- 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:27:54 
Were they poisonous?  
Page 48 of 62 
 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:27:56 
Very little. If they bit you it wouldn't kill you, but it would make you sick.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:28:01 
They did have some poisonous snake. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:28:02 
Mm-hmm.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:28:03 
I mean--  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:28:04 
Oh, yeah, water moccasins, rattlesnake... Everything was down there. We had every kind of 
snake except cobras. We had just about any other kind of snake you want to see. No pythons, but 
all American snakes sort of gather down here because it's nice and warm [laughs]. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:28:27 
Well, did you have much trouble... I assume that you swam. You had a pond there. Is that where 
you swam? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:28:32 
Yeah, we had ponds. We always had a spring, and then down from the spring, we always made a 
nice pond because we had to get wash water and irrigation water and things. When we planted 
our-- transplanted our plants, they were usually depended on rain, mostly. But when you would 
transplant plants, when it was hot weather, you had to carry your water to put on there. So we 
always dug a pond down from the spring, and then we used that for wash water and water to feed 
the cattle and put into the hogs' food and stuff like that. So we always had a pond around. And, 
naturally, it's a big pool of water, there's all kinds of snakes would get in it. And when we wanted 
to swim, we had to get in that pond because the parks and the public pools Black people, wasn't 
allowed at them. So you always had to swim in the rivers and in the ponds and the things like 
this. And then you always had to cope with the snakes, because water moccasins loved to swim. 
And you'd be paddling around and looking around and the water moccasin was paddling along 
by you [laughs].  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:29:46 
So what did you do?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:29:47 
We would run. If you're smart, that's exactly what you would do, because in the water, unless 
you got a pair of wire snips, your best bet is to swim as fast as you can in the opposite direction. 
And the splashing of the water will sort of chase them away. But if you put your hand on them, 
[inaudible] [?bite?] [inaudible], and they are not as poison as a rattlesnake, but they will kill you 
because they're huge. 
 
Page 49 of 62 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:30:13 
So what else did you do for fun?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:30:15 
Oh, we used to go, on the Fourth of Julys, we would go sort of a family reunion. And we go 
picnicking, and we would catch our fish and go way down on the river beds and things and build 
us a fire and fry our fish. We always took [inaudible] iron skillet.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:30:37 
Now, you said family reunion. All your family's still there, aren't they?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:30:40 
Well, I mean, you know, all together, and sometimes the cousins would come over, but mostly 
just the family. And we would go down, and we would take ears of corn to boil.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:30:51 
Was this a river that's near your house, then?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:30:53 
No, no, sometime we'd drive three or four hours to get there, and we'd get up early in the 
morning, and by the time we got there, it would be around sunup, and then we would fish, and 
then we'd come back and fry fish, and we'd play ball and clean out us a place by the river, or 
back out from the river, and we'd really have a ball with the Fourth of July.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:31:14 
Why would you go so far away from home?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:31:16 
Because our river [?wasn't?] very big that was near the house, so we wanted a big place where 
we could catch lots and lots of fish, and then when we would get through eating what we wanted 
at lunchtime, and then we'd eat again in the afternoon, and then we would fill several big 
containers of fish with water in there with them and bring them home. And some of them we 
would kill and eat, and some of them we'd put in our own little river that was close by so that we 
could have fish close by. And then sometimes on Sunday mornings, we would get up. Probably 
Saturday nights, we'd go down and put the hooks in, and then we'd come home, and then get up 
early Sunday morning and go down and pull out great big channel cats and mudcats and bring 
them up and fry them for Sunday morning breakfast [laughs] before we went to church. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:32:08 
Was there a lot of catfish? Is that what you caught mostly, or...? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:32:11 
Well, the biggest ones was catfish. But we did have some type of trout. It wasn't rainbow. I don't 
remember what kind. And we also had green bass and something like [inaudible] [?putch?], we 
called them [?putch?] down there. And we had lots and lots of those. And some of those would 
Page 50 of 62 
 
grow up to 10 and 12 inches, but our catfish, good grief, we'd have some cat 15, 16 pounds. 
Channel cats and mudcats was huge. So we would bring some sort of plant them in our river.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:32:49 
Stock your river. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:32:50 
Uh-huh. [Inaudible] loved fish. So we had lots of fresh fish for two or three days, but no 
refrigerator or anything. You couldn't keep it too long. You would have to fry it up and then eat 
it because it was hot.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:33:06 
So you didn't always go to the same river, then. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:33:08 
No, there were several rivers around that we would go to. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:33:12 
And would you see other people there most of the time? 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:33:18 
OK, it's April 29th. Interview with Dorothy Turner. Interview one, tape two, side two. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:33:29 
OK, at the end of the last tape, we were talking about fish fries, and you were saying that you 
went way back into the woods for these fish fries.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:33:40 
Picnics.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:33:41 
Yeah.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:33:42 
Well, we were way back down into the wooded areas, because we could make all the noise we 
wanted, because if you disturb any white people around, they'd come over and make you move 
because they didn't want to hear any noise or anything. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:33:58 
Would this be on somebody's property, or...? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:34:01 
Well, the river was-- usually was public property, but the white people had. at that time they 
gave them the right to tell you to move when they got [?ready?]. So if you was in the hollering 
distance of some of them, if they didn't want to hear your noise, they'd come over and make you 
move. I don't care what you set up and everything. So this way we would go way down into the 
Page 51 of 62 
 
wooded areas and things. If I was having a truck, we could go way back in without getting stuck, 
because with big boys and everything, we could always get out the branches under the wheels or 
what have you. And if the car stalled, then all my brothers was mechanics, they could fix it and 
come on out. So we didn't worry too much about it.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:34:43 
Well, did-- was your father a mechanic?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:34:45 
Yes, my fa--  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:34:45 
So he taught your brothers? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:34:47 
Uh-huh. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:34:48 
Did he teach the girls, too?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:34:49 
Well, the basics. They taught us how to change batteries and do sort of a tune up type of thing, 
they taught us. But the boys enjoyed motors, and they wanted to make a living at that one day. 
So they all learned to do it well. So we always would go way down in the woods so we could 
have-- make all the noise we wanted to without disturbing any white people.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:35:16 
OK. So before the Fourth of July was really a big day.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:35:19 
Yes, it was really a big time. And if you were too close to white people, they'd throw firecrackers 
and stuff at you. So we didn't want to be [?heckled?] by them, and we got completely out from 
around them, so we just went down where we could be by ourselves and make all the noise we 
wanted to. And we'd play baseball, and the boys would go swimming and everything. We'd 
whoop and laugh and have a good time without bothering anybody or without being bothered by 
anybody. So we just went back into the woods until we could do what we wanted without being 
[?heckled?]. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:35:55 
And what-- was Christmas a big time, too?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:35:57 
Yes, that was the one time that everybody got gifts, even if it was just homemade gifts, even if 
we didn't have enough money to buy stuff, and sometimes we would get just one little item, 
whether it was a toy or anything, we always-- that was the one time of year we always got fresh 
store-bought fruit, the shiny kind, not the type of apples that you gathered off of the trees and 
Page 52 of 62 
 
stuff. We got the nice, shiny, delicious, red apples and the great big oranges and big, nice, golden 
yellow bananas. That was the one time that for Christmas Day we had all kinds of goodies that 
we weren't used to any other time of the year. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:36:42 
What kind of presents did you get?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:36:44 
Well, depending on what-- how good the year was, sometimes we'd get toys, one a piece, never 
over one. And then I can-- 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:36:54 
[?What sort of?] toys?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:36:56 
Usually the girls, dolls and the boys, little trucks or a little train or something, but not the kind 
that put on the track, the kind that you roll around in the dirt. And I remember we all-- we got a 
bicycle. I was about 11, I guess. We got a bicycle for the whole family. And boy, you talking 
about [inaudible]. Every si-- it was a boy's bike, but every single one [inaudible] was big enough 
to stay on it and learn to ride [laughs]. Boy, that bicycle got well ridden [laughs]. And my big 
brother, he would do the repair. When we'd break a chain or something, he could fix it. And we 
all took turns with that bike, yes.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:37:45 
Did you use it for transportation at all?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:37:48 
Yeah, yeah. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:37:48 
Oh, you did? It wasn't just for play?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:37:51 
No, no [inaudible] it was for everything.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:37:53 
Nothing was for play. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:37:55 
[Laughs] We didn't have time for play. So we, oh, we had time. And we played with it too. On 
Sunday afternoon, after we got in from church, we would go up, and we'd-- we had one big hill 
about a half a mile away, on a dirt highway. We used to get on that thing and the first time I can 
remember, I got on it, I wasn't too good at the brakes. I'd forget where the brakes was once in a 
while. I took off down this hill [laughs] a mile a minute, well, oh, I scared to death, but I knew 
better than jump off because it was gravel [laughs]. And it finally dawned on me where the 
brakes was and I almost threw myself off. But, boy, it was lots of fun, when you weren't 
Page 53 of 62 
 
frightened to death [laughs]. And then if you didn't get it stopped, you were going into the big 
highway where [?car would stop?] [laughs]. So we really enjoyed that bike, the whole family. It 
was about six of us would ride that bike practically constantly from the time when we got it 
[laughs] and we would let it wear out, because every time something would break, we'd go get a 
part and put back on it. And that's where I started out with my basic mechanics. I worked on that 
bike and watched James work on that bike. But, boy, it was fun. That's the first time-- it was a 
used bike, but boy, for us, it was like somebody [?bringed in?] Rolls Royce [laughs]. One bike 
for the whole family. But back in those days, bikes was rare. You didn't find many poor people 
with bikes, mostly the rich kids.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:39:32 
So were you really poor?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:39:35 
Well, if somebody would have loaned Dad $100, we'd have enough money to be poor [laughs]. 
Yes, we was poor, and even if we'd have had a good income, we had enough people to eat us 
poor anyway. But we learned. So it was-- I sort of enjoyed the fact that I was poor like that 
because I learned to make ends meet. And that way you know how to stretch what money you 
had. So we learned a-- we lived a good lesson, because we had to. We didn't have it to waste. So 
you learn to really stretch your money to the last penny and get your money's worth, too. You 
learn to shop around a lot.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:40:22 
Well, in the community that you were in, there, were you...? I mean [crosstalk]? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:40:29 
We weren't much worse off than the rest of them. Everybody was in the same boat. So we 
weren't looked down upon as poor people because that was the name of the game. Everybody 
was poor. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:40:42 
Now, during the Depression, or, I don't know, in the mid-Depression, there were... What do you 
call, those camp workers?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:40:56 
Oh, CCs.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:40:57 
Yeah. Did you ever see any of those [crosstalk]?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:40:59 
Mm-hmm. They would come by and buy chickens and eggs and fresh vegetables and sometimes 
watermelons and cantaloupes and stuff from our gardens.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:41:13 
Why would they buy things from you?  
Page 54 of 62 
 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:41:14 
Because they only had C-rations, and they would buy fresh things, and they-- it was interesting 
to us to watch them. They would boil water in their steel helmets and dip the chicken in and pick 
him and then rinse him off and get him dressed out, and then put him in another helmet and cook 
him. They'd boil them in the helmet, and then they would take-- they had rations and things, and 
they would put dumplings in there sometime, and noodles in there sometime, and make them up 
a meal, because they would buy the fresh onions and green peppers and stuff from us to season it 
with when they'd make them chicken and dumplings right out there in the open. And then they 
would give us-- us kids, we wasn't interested in the chicken and dumplings because we had that 
all the time, but they would give us C-rations [laughs]. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:42:07 
Oh, OK. This was after they made a deal with your parents.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:42:12 
Yeah, they made the deal with our parents. But us kids, we'd just be standing around watching 
how they cooked that chicken out there. You know, they didn't have no big pots. So then they 
would-- we'd be standing around, so they'd just give us C-rations, and then they would camp 
overnight, and then they'd move on. And when they left, they'd have lots and lots of unopened C-
rations and stuff all around because they knew we kids liked it. So we would go rush out there 
the next morning, and we would see they was gone, and just gather up the C-rations and we'd eat 
them like cookies.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:42:42 
Oh. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:42:43 
So we enjoyed it.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:42:44 
So what kind of rations were they?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:42:45 
Well, they had corned beef in cans, and they had baked beans in cans, and they had these hard 
tacks, I think they called them cookies, and they would be in cans, and they had all kinds of 
things. And then when they would get this fresh food, and then they wouldn't have to eat that that 
day. So they'd be going back to their camps. So they just leave all of the other stuff that they 
would have had to eat the night before. They leave it out there for us, so we'd go out and get it.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:43:12 
Were there Black and white people in these camps?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:43:15 
Page 55 of 62 
 
No, just white. I think it was because they were just getting jobs started. And before the Blacks 
could get jobs, they had to get jobs for the whites first. And I guess that was why it was only 
whites, unless they sent a Black to the North or something.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:43:34 
So you never saw any [crosstalk]?  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:43:35 
If there were Black [crosstalk].  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:43:35 
We never saw any Black CCs. It was all whites. And at that time they-- the camps were 
segregated, so it would have been a whole Black camp. So they wouldn't have any integration in 
the camps.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:43:47 
If there were Blacks, it would have had to be a whole company of Blacks, because they couldn't 
be in with the whites. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:43:58 
Do you remember any of the Jim Crow laws? I mean, were they still in effect [crosstalk]?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:44:04 
Oh, yeah, even the public hospitals, the front door had "White" over it, and the Black-- the-- 
"White only" over it. And the back door way around from the alleys and things was was 
"Colored". You had to go in the doors that was marked "Colored". All the bathrooms, the nice, 
clean ones up front was white only, then you go way around in the alley and find something 
almost like an outhouse, and that was for the Blacks. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:44:32 
Was that the way it was in Oxford?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:44:34 
Yeah.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:44:35 
OK. How about at restaurants and--  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:44:37 
Everything.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:44:38 
Could you-- was there a restaurant that you could eat in?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:44:41 
Page 56 of 62 
 
Not unless it was a Black restaurant. The white restaurants, the only way you could get food was 
to go around to the back window. And only some of them would do that. They would give you 
short orders out the back window. But most--  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:44:52 
How about department stores, and-- were there other departments stores?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:44:55 
Yeah, there was a department store, [?but you've got--?] I mean, everybody [?got to?] shop, but 
the bathrooms and things were segregated.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:45:00 
How about trying on clothes? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:45:01 
Uh, most of the places you could try on clothes, but-- because you wouldn't buy them unless you 
could try them on, so that's the only way they could sell us clothes was to let us try them on. But 
very few Black people bought ready-made clothes. Most Black people went in with their pattern 
and measured up what they wanted of cloth and took it home and made them. Little boys with 
blue jeans and things like that and coveralls and stuff like that was mostly what the business that 
they got from the Blacks, other than very few. Because I can remember the first store-bought 
dress I ever had. I must have been 12 years old, and that's the only one I've ever had in my life. 
So my mother would make her own patterns most of the time. She would line us up and either 
take newspaper or brown paper bag and look in the Sears catalog and cut the pattern that fit us 
and make the dress identical with what she saw the catalog, she learned to do that. She was a 
dress maker, and she could make pants for the boys, too, and jackets. So the average Black 
woman back in those days made most of the children's clothes, but on rare occasions when  you 
could afford to buy one, you could try them on. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:46:20 
Was there any kind of public transportation? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:46:22 
No city buses or anything, because Oxford was so small it didn't have city buses, so we didn't 
have to bother with the going to the back of the bus, except the Greyhounds and the trains. In the 
trains, you'd go in and get sent into a car. And the whites would have a car up-- [inaudible] when 
you went to the bathroom, you had to go through the white cars, but you couldn't sit. You'd go 
through the cars going to the kitchen or to the bathroom, but you couldn't stop [inaudible]. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:47:00 
OK, what do you remember about World War II?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:47:06 
Oh, I can remember when they first-- when it first started. We started hearing about them 
dropping bombs and things in all of these countries. And we, every time we hear a plane coming 
over, we'd get frightened, because we thought that they would-- could drop bombs on us, but 
Page 57 of 62 
 
[inaudible] being so small, it never dawned on us they wouldn't waste a bomb on a miserable 
little farm sitting out in the middle of nowhere, but we figured, you know, since we were 
dropping bombs over there, that they would drop bombs back. But fortunately, it was only our 
planes that we heard [laughs]. We didn't have to deal with that. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:47:39 
Did any of your brothers go?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:47:42 
Yes, my oldest brother, he went in in '42. He was stationed in Germany and in Africa.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:47:51 
Did he see any action?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:47:52 
Yes, he was in seven battles, and one time it was only three people left alive. And after the battle 
was over -- the Germans won that round -- and way into the night, he would hear people scream, 
and the Germans would go around and take the dead bodies over and stick them with the 
bayonet. And he laid there underneath a couple of dead people, and one guy came along to pull 
one of the dead people off and stuck him again with the bayonet. But since it was still another 
one in there, they didn't bother to dig down to the third one, that's the way he stayed alive. And 
then after they was-- everything quieted down, then in the middle of the night, he crawled back 
into the woods, and he got away. And it was-- and then when he got back to-- he didn't get back 
to his [?company?], oh, gosh, I guess it must have been three or four days before he got behind 
lines again, and then when he found out later that it was only him and two more people that was 
left alive.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:49:00 
Did he see any action after that?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:49:04 
Yes, he was in a battle once before, but this time, the Americans won. He didn't have to go 
through that again. They had-- they would follow behind where the planes was going on to drop 
bombs first, and then they would go there. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:49:23 
Was he in a segregated platoon-- 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:49:27 
Yeah. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:49:27 
--or whatever you would call it? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:49:29 
Page 58 of 62 
 
At that time all of the [inaudible] segregated, so his whole [?company?] was Black, colonels and 
everybody in his outfit.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:49:42 
Did he ever-- did he ever go into any already captured villages or whatever? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:49:51 
Not the whole village. There was places that was off limits for him that they wasn't even allowed 
to go. [Crosstalk]--  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:49:59 
Because they were Black?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:50:00 
No, because they get the soldiers in, you know, [inaudible] the places and things, and they-- 
couple of times-- I mean, the enemy, they would get him-- get a lot of them into one place, and 
then they would go in and throw grenades and stuff like that. One time they went into one of 
those places, and they had to fight their way out with the-- luckily they had some-- they weren't 
allowed to take the regular guns with them, but they had some stowaways [laughs]. Being Black 
and in a foreign country, you usually put something on to protect yourself. So it was a lot of 
them in there one time and... Then they went into one place in Germany. When they first got 
there, these girls that was in this dance place kept looking behind them and turning them around, 
and he says, "What's wrong with you?" "I'm looking for your tail." Some white soldiers had told 
them that all the Black people had tails like monkeys. So this German woman didn't have any 
better sense, so one of the guys pulled his pants down [inaudible]. [Laughs.] 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:51:07 
[Inaudible.]  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:51:18 
He had had one too many to drink, of course. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:51:21 
I see. Was that your brother?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:51:22 
[Laughs] not quite. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:51:28 
OK. So after-- right after the war, you left home, is that right? And, well, the war was really kind 
of a transition for your family, because some of the older kids were leaving, [?too?] [crosstalk.]  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:51:43 
And went north?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:51:43 
Page 59 of 62 
 
Yes, they found out that they could make a fairly decent way in the North. And they was getting 
tired of-- they was young men and women by then, and they was getting tired of working all year 
long to just barely have enough food to make it through the winter. So they started to move. My-
- after my brother went into the Army, it wasn't very long until my older sister got married and 
left.  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:52:14 
And went north. And then once she went north, that left someone for everybody else to go stay 
with until they could find them a place of their own. So that way everybody started migrating 
away. And then I finally decided to try my wings in about three more years, and that was a hard 
life, and we figured we could do better for ourselves. So as we moved on, the little ones, they 
grew up until they was big enough to strike out on their own, and then everybody moved on, 
because nobody wanted to raise their family under the same conditions that we had to grow up 
under. We wanted a little better for our families than we had [sniffs]. So as we learned trades, 
moved out on our own, and by starting out with so little [inaudible] it didn't take a lot for us to 
get started on. We was used to doing without, so... And the worst type of job that we could get in 
the North was paying us a lot better than the best type of job that they would let us have in the 
South. So we struck out. Even though we had to pay a little more for rent and everything, we 
found that we could do quite well on our own without any help, and by being brought up as 
independents from six years old. I had no trouble. It always seemed that there was food on my 
table and warm place to sleep with decent clothes on my back. And I always, instead of living 
worse, I always lived a little bit better every year and learned a little bit more [sniffs].  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:53:16 
So you really feel that you learned a lot from those-- 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:54:02 
From being ind-- having to be independent and having to be self supported. I learned from that 
that you can get by on your own, and I not only had to be responsible for myself, I was always 
responsible for the kids that were smaller than me, and that gave me a feeling of independence 
and a feeling that I could survive. Because if I could survive for myself and two or three little 
ones, I certainly could survive for myself alone. So I never, I never had a s-- not a single moment 
of worry that I wouldn't be able to feed myself and wouldn't be able to find a place to stay. I went 
to my sister's, stayed two weeks, and with two weeks wages, I struck out on my own and seeing 
that I had a place to stay, or a job, always, and not being fussy about what I had to do, as long as 
it was legal, to make a living. I could always go into a town and find me a job in two or three 
days, and I've always continued-- in any job I ever had, I always left it where I could go back to 
it if I needed to. I never messed over my employer, and I always figured if I ever needed to, I 
could always go back to that same person and work. And every job I got, I changed jobs because 
I was getting a little bit more money and a little bit better job. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:55:29 
What do you think is the biggest difference between-- I mean, other than being able to get better 
paying jobs, what was the difference between the North and the South?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:55:38 
Page 60 of 62 
 
You didn't have the pressure on you. What you was capable of doing, you could get. And down 
South, I don't care how capable you was, you got what the white folks didn't want. As long as a 
white person wanted that job, they would pick a white person up that couldn't read and write and 
give him a skilled job before they would let you walk in and take that job, whether you was 
qualified for it or not. There were certain jobs that Black people just did not get. They didn't 
matter whether you knew how to do it or not. You was Black, and that kept you from getting it. 
And when you got into the North, you got what you was qualified to do. So that was the main 
thing, and then you didn't have that pressure hanging on you. When you went on a Fourth ofJuly 
picnic, you didn't have to go 15 miles into the woods so you'd get out of hearing distance of the 
white. You went up there and competed for that job with the white and you was considered as a 
human being like everybody else was.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:56:35 
Did you find that there was still racism in the North [inaudible]? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:56:37 
Yes, there was racism, but compared, you was allowed to talk and fight back for yourself. You 
didn't have to take it and walk away meekly, because when somebody done something you didn't 
like, you told him about it, and he knew if he came across that line, you-- he had you to deal 
with. So that made a lot of difference, where you could stand up for your own right, without 
having-- without being lynched. And that made all the difference in the world to me.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:57:05 
OK, this would have still been around '47, '48-- 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:57:08 
Mm-hmm. [?'49?]. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:57:10 
'49, something like that? So it's still, I mean, there was still a-- 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:57:13 
Still a lot of things happening down South. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:57:18 
Well, there was still things happening in the North, too. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:57:20 
Mm-hmm. But compared to what was down there, the Northern people-- what the Northern 
people was fighting for was what we had never heard of. We had never heard of being that far 
along yet, and then we came out of the South and got decent jobs--  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:57:37 
What city did you go to?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:57:39 
Page 61 of 62 
 
First I went to St. Louis, Missouri. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:57:43 
That was North?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:57:45 
Compared to Mississippi, it was Far North. And then when-- and then I stopped in Howardville, 
Missouri, for a little while. But you still was able to vote.  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:57:57 
You couldn't vote in [crosstalk]?  
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:57:58 
You couldn't vote in Mississippi, then. Not in our little town, anyway. Black people wasn't 
allowed to vote. You could be a college graduate, and you wasn't allowed to vote. And--  
 
Mary L. Rice  1:58:08 
You could vote in St. Louis? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:58:10 
You could vote in-- you could vote in St. Louis, and you had lots and lots of privileges in St. 
Louis that you didn't-- wouldn't even dream about in Mississippi. And then I went to Detroit, 
Michigan. Detroit, Michigan, you-- the housing wasn't as segregated as it was in St. Louis, and 
the jobs wasn't as segregated in Michigan. Whatever you was qualified to do you could do, and 
that way it was a bigger town and a lot more jobs, and then you could train, you could go to 
school. I found out that you could go to night school and learn a lot of trades. And I used to work 
in the daytime, and then go to school at night and got me a trade going. I got to be a cook, and 
then I can make a decent wage. And then with a decent wage, and used to-- being used to living 
on a little bit of nothing, I found that I could live and save a little bit. Then I-- after I saved a 
little bit, then I got me a business of my own. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:59:20 
OK, well, I'm sorry to say that we're running out of tape here fast. Is there any last thoughts that 
you'd like to leave for posterity here? 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:59:33 
Do the best you can, get as far as you can go on what you got, and have a lot of ambition, and 
you can make it. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:59:44 
OK. Well, thank you very much. I certainly enjoyed this interview. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:59:49 
You're very welcome. 
 
Mary L. Rice  1:59:50 
Page 62 of 62 
 
And I will be back [laughs]. 
 
Dorothy Mae Turner  1:59:52 
[Laughs] OK. 