H-2SI THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL SOUTHERN ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM Carolina Piedmont Project Interview with ERNEST D. HICKUM March 27, 1980 Greenville, South Carolina By AlTen Tullos Transcribed by Dorothy M. Casey Original transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection Louis "Round Wilson Library
ALLEN TULLOS: Mr. Hickum, let me start by finding out when you were born, and where you were born. ERNEST D. I was born in Madison County in 1912. Could you tell me a little about your family in Madison County? Well, I was raised on a farm, done a little farm work. Had our own hogs and cows and horses. We raised tobacco and corn. Wheat, a little wheat. Good garden with all different kind of vegetables, Always had our own milk and butter, meat and chickens. Daddy's brother, he lived down here at Woodside Mill on Fifth Street, and he kept wanting my daddy to come down here, bring all us kids, and start working in the cotton mill. We'd get rich. So my daddy, he finally sold out and come down here. He just studied and grieved about selling everything he had and coming down here. He couldn't work in no cotton mill, so he went back to the mountains, I went back and stayed a while, piddled around up there. Drove a truck a little, helped Woodrow Gregory. And I decided I'd come back down here and try again. I come back and worked some for this filling station for Earl Goslin. 1 drove a truck a pretty good while for C.J. Moody. Then 1 went back in the Woodside Mill in '51. I worked over there in the weave room about twenty-three years, clean-up job, and overhead job, cleaning out ducts, cleaning up waste, blowing off looms. [long pause, coughing, trouble with breathing? I worked 'til I just about couldn't work. 1 thought it was something working on my breathing problem. I didn't know what it was. And I just got so I couldn^t run my job like I'd always been used to, and I just decided I'd have to get out of the cotton looms, so I quit. I ain't got no better yet. It just gets worse instead of better.
Ernest D. Hickum 2 Was it after you had quit work there that you found out about the Brown Lung Association? Yep. And they got to talking about had I ever thought of telling them and found out, go to a doctor and find out. They believed I could have brown lung. And that's when I went to Atlanta and the doctor said I had it. After I went to him and come back, the Mill company sent me to their doctor up in Shelby. He told them, I reckon the same thing, that I had brown lung. He said I had an awful bad breathing problem. [coughing and difficult breathing throughout] Could you describe again a bit about what you had to do in your job, when you were cleaning out the ducts, and what that was like? I had to crawl through them ducts. You was confined in the inside of them, all the dust and lint and stuff, it was pitiful. Had to take an old broom and cut it off, it'd be stubby. You'd get in there and scrape that stuff loose and push it out to the end where it'd fall out in the spare floor. And I'd get down in that old dust, eating that old dust and lint and stuff, blowing back in your face. Then you come down outa there, you couldn't tell what you ware made out of. Your head and mouth and clothes, everything is covered in it. It was rough, 1 These were what they called air conditioning ducts. They called them air condition ducts. I don't know, I'd call it different, a, fan a-blowing through.,.1, don't know what you'd call it. Built out of galvanized tin, what they built out of. And they ran them overhead in the weave room? Yeah, some such. They'd drop down, I imagine three or four foot from the ceiling, had bars running under them and bolted back onto the ceiling to hold them up.
ERNEST D. HICKUM 3 And then they would have these vents in the side that'd be blowing out...? They had vents in the side that blowed out. And they had the heads of the humidity pipes run in front of the vents and that blowed the humidity and spread it over the weave room, on account of making the weaving run bad. When that thread on them looms gets dry, the thread breaks as fast as you can tie it back. If you don't keep a little humidity, d amp, it ain't no way you can run a set of looms. You can't run a set nohow now. Used to say run a set and set on it run. _?J But you sure can't do it no more. You can never get them started up. Do you know how long they had those kind of ducts in the Woodside Mill, where you worked? Was somebody doing that job before you came? Well, they wasn't in there the first time I worked over there, but when I come back to Woodside, why, they was in there. And they'd took out the windows and bricked up the windows. Let's go back a little bit, back to Madison County again, and get you to tell me: how large was your family in Madison County? How many brothers and sisters did you have? Well, there's four of us boys and three girls. And your father owned this piece of land, the farm? He owned a hundred and ten acres when we left. That was a pretty good sized farm for Madison County, I guess? Well, there was over half of it in woodland, but we had all we could tend that was cleared out. Had pasture for the cows and horses, when they wadn't working. We turn them in the pasture.
ERNEST D. HICKUM 4 Where did you come among your brothers and sisters? Were you the oldest or youngest or in the middle? No, I got two brothers and two sisters older than I am, then I got a sister and a brother that's younger. Do you remember the day or the days? How long did it take to come in from Madison County to Greenville? Do you remember that trip, and how did you make that? The best I remember that man that moved us down here had an old model Dodge truck. Well, it wasn't old model back then. It took... we left there in the morning and it was way up in evening when we got down there. Old cars and trucks don't run like they do now. Did he live down here, the man that moved you? No, he lived up there. Just a slatted-up, bodied truck, just a pile of stuff in it, moved it down here. What did you all bring with you? Well, we brought what house stuff we could bring, canned stuff and meat, stuff like that. You brought canned vegetables and canned meat? Salted meat? It was just cured meat. We had it cured out, ham and middlings. And canned stuff, green beans and different kind of vegetables, canned in glass fruit jars. We brung a lot that stuff. Now when all that was gone we had to start going to the store and living out of a tin can. My daddy didn't like that. He didn't like it? That's what hurt. So he wanted to move back to the mountains. Did he work in the mill? He tried to a little bit, but he couldn't do nothing with it.
ERNEST D. HICKUM 5 What department did he start in? room to sweep. I believe...seems to me like they put him in the card He got around that machinery and he never seen nothing like it. And you know what a racket machinery makes. I think he was more scared of it than he was trying to run the job he was...i think the machinery scared him too much to try to run a job. He'd never seen nothing like that. He'd been around old sawmills and stuff, outside, but a lot of difference in that. Did you all see a train up in Madison County? Oh, there was one that run through Hot Springs, just eight miles from the house. We'd hook up a team and wagon and go to Hot Springs, go down about ten or eleven o'clock and stay an hour or two, drive back. Sometimes we worked two or three days cutting and splitting up stove wood, and get a big old wagon load of stove wood and haul it all the way down there. Get two dollars and a half for that big load of stove wood. Load of wood like that now would bring you a hundred dollars. We had to cut it the hard way, them old cross cut saws. Never heard tell of a chain saw, like you got now. reckon? Had your father ever worked in one of those sawmills, do you Had he ever worked with any machinery? I don't remember him ever working in no sawmills, but he hauled a lot of lumber. He had a big team of mules. Back when I was just a little kid--there weren't no trucks back then; maybe you'd see an old model, old chain-drive (I don't know if you ever seen one of them or not), just like a bicycle chain, only it was about that wide; it had cog wheels on the back; that's the first kind of truck I ever seen. That's how farmers, in the wintertime, would make a little extra money, haul that lumber.
ERNEST D. HICKUM 6 They'd haul all day from before day 'til after dark. Make a trip from the sawmill to Hot Springs. See, they'd haul it down there to the railroad. The only way they ever had to make any extra money. First time I ever seen one of them old trucks, on of them old chain drives, one of them come up and started hauling lumber. He couldn't haul very little more than my daddy could haul on that wagon, but he could make two trips a day and my daddy couldn't make but one. Now it wasn't but a year or two that they got bringing them other kind of trucks in there and just cut the poor farmers plumb out of the sawmill, hauling lumber. Do you know any more about why your father's brother had gotten into Greenville? I don't know now. He moved here before I got big enough to realize anything about it. But I've heard my brother and mother talk about it. That Uncle Jake and Aunt Bertie used to live on Shelton Laurftl where they run them big sawmills and they kept boarders all the time. That's what they do over here. Both of them's dead now but my first cousin he got a ftig place right over here, just a little piece from Woodside Mill over there, Keeps all kinds of boarders, boards people. He got regular rooms, he rents you a room. If you want to eat, they furnish you three meals a day, And it's set out on a table. You eat what you want. AT; And that's what your aunt and -uncle used to do? Yeah. And they worked in the mill, too? No. The one's that are running it now used to work in the mill, both used to work in the mill all the time.
ERNEST D. HICKUM 7 So your father's brother just felt that since there were so many of you children, that you all could get rich down here? Yeah, he said we could make...talked my daddy into it that we could make a lot of money. But there wadn't no money in it back in them days. I guess it was big money then, but my daddy sure didn't like it. When you started, how many of your brothers and sisters started to work? My daddy and me and one of the girls I believe is all that ever did go to the mill. Seems to me like that's all there was. And that didn't last long. And how long do you reckon it was? Would it be six months or a year? I imagine when we come down here, it was about a year 'til they went back. Close to it, anyhow. Describe a little bit about what you did. What was your first job in the mill? Learning to doff. I worked fifty-five hours and drawed three dollars and twenty cents I believe it was for fifty-five hours of work. How old do you reckon you were then? [laughter] I don't know. I was awful small. I don't have the least idea. You would have been ten or twelve years old? Fourteen years old? I must have been up toward twelve. I just don't know. I wouldn't say. So you were a doffer in the spinning room? Yeah.
ERNEST D. HICKUM 8 And what exactly would you do on your job? Have you ever been in a spinning room? AT; Yes, sir. Well, you take them full bobbins off of the spindle frame and put in clean bobbins. And you put them all in a box? You put all your filling in a box and it went to the weave room. And they sent empty quills from the weave room back to the spinning room, and doffed the frames and just changed, took off a full one and put on empty. And you say that you weren't big enough even to empty out your.,., I couldn't pour the filling off. I could doff, the doff box full, but I couldn't pour it up, You used to have to pour it up in a hopper over here. It went down through a shute to the spinning room, but they don't do that no more. It's doffed in a box, a regular doff box and the whole box is sent to the spinning room. AT; Do you remember any impressions that yon have about the bosses, who would be in charge of you at that time? I can remember that man's name >the boss weaver as good as I can mine. Mr. Thompson, boss weaver. Hovie Pruit was boss spinner. How would they treat you? They was good to you back then. Always was me. They didn't come driving on you all time. Saying, 'You got to do this' and 'You got to do that.' They never did me. They was always good back then. The first time I ever went in a cotton mill, they was extra good to me. Did you get to go to school very much? About two months in fourth grade; seven different grades in one room. From A-B-Cs up to seventh grade. I went a little bit in the fourth.
ERNEST D. HICKUM 9 That's all I ever got to go. Where was that? That was in Madison County. Was that before you came down here? Yeah. Now, when your parents went back, they took the whole family back? Did you go back with them at that same time? Did everybody leave at once? Did you stay a while? No, I stayed on a while before I went back up there. Where did you stay? Stayed with... [long pause] Would you stay with your uncle? Where did I stay? [long pause] No. I did go back with them. And then my sister come back and married Paul Floyd. And they moved on to Seventh Street, the same street we left off of. And I come back and stayed with them, my sister and Paul Floyd. I went back to the mountains, that's right. I was thinking that I didn't go when they did, but I did, when they first went back. Your sister stayed? She got married to Paul Floyd and they was living off just a little piece on that street there. Did she stay on in the mill? Well, she worked some in the mill. She never did work too much in the mill. Filled batteries. She lives down there now, at Easley. Her husband died here a while back. What was her first name? Mamie.
ERNEST D. HICKUM 10 And so when you came back down here, that's when you started driving a truck? Well, when I come back down here... Seems like I started driving a truck when I first come back, for a while. Then I went to work a while in a filling station down here at Parker High. Earl Gosnell's filling station. Back then you didn't keep up with jobs that you changed, how long you worked on them or what date it was, nor nothing about it. It's awful hard to remember all this. Well, you just have to set down...1 believe if I could just set down and study out from week in to week out what I done from the time I was ten or twelve years old on up to now. But you do remember working in the filling station there, near Parker High School? Yeah, 1 practically run the station just like it was mine for a long time there. He used to fool with old cars and he'd leave and got to Pennsylvania and be gone for a week at a time. I done the buying and the selling or whatever I wanted to do. Did you learn how to repair cars? No, I didn't try to work on the motors or nothing. I could change spark plugs, fan belts, fix flat tires, things like that. Grease them, change old filters. But as far as mechanic business. I never did take that up. You mentioned a Mr. Moody, C.J. Moody: you drove a truck for him. Was that before you were working at the service station or after that? It seems to me like that I worked for him a while, then I worked at the filling station a while, then I finally went back. After I got up, before I went to work in the mill, I drove a moving van for him. After I got some age on me.
ERNEST D. HICKUM 11 What were you doing during the Depression? Do you remember that coming along? Were you able to keep a job during that hard times during the early nineteen thirties? It was a short period of time and I didn't care whether I had a job or not. I just rambled here and yonder. You know how young boys used to do. Did you leave South Carolina? Backwards and forwards. Go up there most every week then the next week be back down here. What about World War II? What did you do during World War II? I worked at Woodside. At Woodside. We're not quite up to '51. You weren't in the service at all? They turned me down on something. I never did find out what they turned me down on. guess I'd had a operation when I went in there. And they called me down for an examination of my back. Two or three doctors came in and examined me. BEGIN TAPE I, SIDE II And I just had the operation when I went in there. And if they hadn't turned me down on that, I don't know, 'cause I was working. When did you get married? [long pause] I believe it was June the 10th, 1936. I believe that's pretty close on the date. What is your wife's name? Opal Lee.
ERNEST D. HICKMAN 12 What was her name before you married? Opal Lee Shepard. How did you all meet? Would you talk a little bit about your courting days? Well, I just met her and started going with her. She was working at Monaghan Mil 1 at that time. We finally got married and went to housekeeping. Got us a house over in West Greenville. I think house payments back then were about two dollars and a half for three rooms. Water bill was fifty cents. She worked at Monaghan, What department did she work in? Spinning room. She was a spinner. As soon as you all married, did she quit her job? No, she worked on a pretty good while. Did you all have any children? Not at that time. We never had any kids until '38. How many children did you have? Three boys. That's where I been the last day or two. One of them's off on vacation. He asked me to come up there and hang around with him. He's been painting a little on the gabled ends, messing around. His wife runs that Merle Norman shop over here on Poinsett Highway, and leave him by himself he won't do nothing-. But I can go up there and sit around in the yard and talk to him, and he'll work up a storm. If there ain't nobody there, though, he'll just lay down there on the couch and watch the T.V. and go to sleep. I got one boy that works for Piedmont Natural Gas, he's a collectorfor Piedmont Natural Gas. And I got one's a service man for Sears and Roebuck. All of them got good jobs.
ERNEST D. HICKUM 13 The oldest one, where I been up there, he's overseer at Steel Heddle. He's over all the shops, the electricians and all. Think he said he's got about thirty-six men. Where did they go to school? Up there at Berea and Parker. All three of them been in the service. Do you remember whether or not your wife quit severaliyears before you all started having children, or did she wait until you all had children and quit? And then did she go back to work in the mill any after that? What can you remember about that? No, I don't think she ever went back to work after the kids was born. She worked, I believe, about fourteen years with General. Hospital i when she quit over there. She hadn't worked none for quite a while. Then she went over here to Franklin Road, I guess that's what they call it. Worked for Sloan's nursery right about six or seven years. Then she quit.over there and didn't work no more. How long did she work in the mill? I don't know exactly how long she worked in the mill. Five years or ten years? I don't believe I ever heard her say how long she worked in the mill. Did you all ever give any advice to your children about whether or not you wanted them to work in the textile mills or not? My oldest boy, he worried me to death to get him a job over there. At Woodside? Yeah. I got him one. Then he worked just a little while and he quit on them. I didn't know he was quitting every day, just about it. Boss man catched (see next page).
ERNEST D. HICKUM 14 him and begged him to come back. All at once he started coming in begging us of a night to sign his papers to go in the service. I didn't know what was happening. He said, 'You don't want me to go in the service?' Well, we tried to talk him out of it, but it wasn't no use. We just went ahead and signed them and he went in. So we didn't have to talk to him about no cotton mill. They never would go in a cotton mill, I don't reckon. If the other two, either one of them, has ever seen the door of one, I don't know it. Again going back to your parents and how you were brought up, were they pretty strict on you, or kind of let you do what you wanted to do? How were you brought up? I done what they said to do, or I got tore up. If they said come in early at night, you'd better be there. If I layed out and come in late, my daddy said tonight, 'You going to get a whipping in the morning, you better mark it in your book that you're going to get it, too.' He'd tell you the night before and give it to you in the morning? If I come in late, he'd say, 'You'll catch it in the morning.' And you caught it. Kids come in like they do now, they say, 'I'll whip you,' and that's the last of it. Did they ever teach you to say, 'yes, sir' or 'no, sir'? Like me and you setting here? I'd be setting over there. Like me and you talking now. I'd better not jump in and ask nothing or say no.thing while they were talking. That was szrictly ruled out. They didn't allow you to jump in when they was talking to somebody else. My mother wadn't too bad to whip us. She might take a little hickory or something, But when my daddy whipped, you know'd you had a whipping. And when he told you you was going to get one, you got it.
ERNEST D. HICKUM 15 What did he use? Most of the time, an old leather... Razor strop? A razor strop. You know they used to be double? So he did that every now and then? When you done something that he told you not to, you just as well figure on you going to get it. If he told you to have something done that evening when he come home, you better have it done. Is that how most of the children were brought up back then? Most of them back then was. A very few had got by too much. They's did. What about your religion? Did you all belong to a church back there in Madison County? How often did you go? I always had church all the time on Saturday night or maybe on Sundays, Sunday school and preaching on Sunday. Like around here they didn't hold revivals like they did around churches nowadays. But they had church. I think it was close to three miles for us to walk to church. We used to go, us kids, go to Sunday school, every Sunday morning and sometimes they'd have something to do, maybe singing or some preacher'd come on Sunday night. We'd go back and make another round. What denomination did you belong to? Baptist. Did you join the Baptist church here in Greenville? No. I ain't...we go to a Baptist church. We don't go nowhere like we should go. Two of the boys and their wives and kids belongs to the Baptist Church up here on the Poinsett Highway, Wren Memorial Baptist. It's a big church.
ERNEST D. HICKUM 16 There was a lot of singing back in Madison County. It has a real reputation and long tradition for singing: ballad singing, gospel singing and different kinds. Well, they used to have a lot of singing back then. Now on the Fourth of July, they don't do that no more. A farmer, maybe one would raise a hog, maybe one'd raise a beef, maybe one'd raise a sheep, have mutton. And on the Fourth of July they'd set up a big dinner and they'd have homemade tables, just take beds and make tables sometimes, a hundred-and-f ifty, maybe two hundred foot long wide as this thing is long here. It'd be set with anything you wanted to eat. You don't hear tell it no more. I can understand why you moved back, why your family moved back. Everybody wouldn't raise them, but there'd be enough raising to feed everybody. If you doesn't raise any and I raised a big beef, why, I'd save you part of it for just about what it cost me to feed it. They had it figured out to where it didn't cost nobody too much. There'd just be wagon loads and wagon loads of rations come in on that Sunday to set that dinner on the Fourth of July, or whenever it was, whatever day it set on. Old people back there, they used to look forward to that Fourth of July. It'd be all day long. And everybody enjoyed theirself. What about when you all moved here to Greenville: did your family get to have a garden? Was there any garden space? No. We didn't have any garden. They used to have hogs and cows down at Woodside pasture down there, but we didn't have any. A few people had them, but very few. Do you remember hearing any music here, like you heard back home in Madison County?
ERNEST D. HICKUM 17 No, nothing when I first come around down here, I wasn't around too much music nowhere. Do you know whether or not they had any dances in people'^ houses, like they still do some, up in Madison County? Do you remember going to any house dances? Well, we used to go around to what they call little old parties, around at friends' houses. And then it got so...we had a pretty good time for quite a while, two or three years, I guess. Then some of them smart-aleck boys used to slip around and get a little liquor and they'd come in and start raising cane and causing disturbance. Finally it just died out altogether. They wouldn't let them gang up. They first started it down at Woodside and they'd have twenty-five to thirty. Have a good time. They had drink and they had some food. You never did get something started good 'til some smart-aleck come in and try to take it over. And so people quit letting them gang up like that. They used to gang up out there in the yard when Grover and Alice used to live down on Woodside and there'd be a yard full down there. Would people bring their musical instruments and dance at those kind of things? Several boys around there could make their own music. Alice's brother, one I was talking about telling them jokes, he was a good guitar picker. What's his name? Lawrence Grogan. Can you remember the names of any other of those musicians back then? Wallace Nix, he used to play guitar right smart.
ERNEST D. HICKUM 18 He was in the Woodside Village? Yeah. Did any of them ever have a band that was good enough to get on the radio or make a record or anything like that? Not as I know of. I don't reckon any of them ever got together and tried to do it. Now that little old Moates boy that used to live over there behind the mill, that boy, he could really tap dance and play a guitar. Moates? HICKUM. Yeah. His uncle lived right up there, about the third house now. But I don't know whatever happened to that boy. I hadn't heard tell of him in several years. [End of Interview]
I visited Mr. Hickum on a cold day in March, 1980. He and I sat on a couch in a room at the front of the house. Ms. Hickum was working in the kitchen and watching television. The main purpose of the visit to Mr. Hickum was to get his telling of the working conditions which gave him brown lung disease. He told me the story once, as we were getting acquainted, before I turned on the tape recorder. In the process I learned that his father was one of the migrants to the mills from the mountains who didn't like what he found and went back to the country. Mr. Hickum had considerable breathing trouble and also had a hearing problem. Both of these conditions put limits on the time and number of questions I could ask. Thus the interview is incomplete in many respects. Coincidentally, as I was leaving I caught sight of Brown Lung Association member Grover Hardin being interviewed on television about the new dust standards which were going into effect. I stood in the kitchen with the Hickums while we watched and listened to their friends, the Hardins, on tv. It was my impression that the Hickums were heartened, at least a little, by what they saw. Like Grover Hardin, Ernest Hickum had a brown lung compensation claim mmm- of several years' standing with Woodside Mills.