Memories
An Oral History
by Streetie Benson

Memories are a wonderful thing. You can play them over in your mind time and time again. But the sad thing about it is, wherever death comes, your memories go with you. So, I'm going to put my memories on a tape, so they won't go. Some of them for 75 years. So this consists of memories.

The first thing I remember was in South Carolina down in Sumpter County. We lived in the Becky McGee place. Their old farm has long time been gone but we lived there.

What I remember most about it was my Father. He was share cropped on the side, he hewed out cross ties for the railroad down in that part of the country. He felled the trees with a broad ax, boxed them off on four sides and made a cross tie, haul them all the way to Timmonsville South Carolina and sold them for twenty cents. Occasionally he would carry me in the woods with him, put me out of the way and I'd watch him hew out those cross ties, time and time again and again.

And this one time I especially remember was, me and my sister Annie went down in the woods where he was cutting and we had just got out of the bed with the measles. So we started across a foot log across the creek and we fell in and then my Father pulled us out.

The farm we lived on was known as the Becky McGee Farm. There were some small farm houses and then there was the big house where they had the kitchen and fed the help. They'd have a bell on it that they would ring when they wanted the hands to come in from the fields for dinner. One day the bell started ringing and ringing and ringing and just wouldn't quit. I looked over that way over toward the house and I saw the smoke rising, the main house had caught on fire and burnt to the ground. So, we moved right after that.

Before we moved, I remember my Father carrying a load of cross ties to Timmonsville South Carolina. And on the way to Timmonsville, the old mule saw a car coming. They didn't understand why that car could go without something pulling it and you would have to get off the wagon, hold the mule and hold the mule until the car got by. Even a bicycle, if one of those came along, you would have to get off the wagon on the dirt road and hold the mule's bridle until the bicycle got by. But this particular time they got to Timmonsville and were unloading crossties and a train whistle blew their whistle right near where the mule was, and they had to go back home and get that mule and wagon. That mule went home.

A little time after thatwe moved from this location to about a mile and a half to another place (owned by) one we called humpback Andy Coleman. He was a little fellow who drove a T-Model Ford and on his back was a growth that had worn a hole in the back of the seat in the T-Model. I remember very well of crawling up on the running board and looking over into his T-Model Ford and this hole in the seat and when he got out he was all bent over and he has a hump on his back. We stayed at his place there in a three room house for a while.

I remember my brothers Lee and Ellis, my older brothers, would get to fighting. My Father would put one on the front doorsteps and one on the back doorsteps and make them sit there in complete darkness until they were punished for what they had done. In this house we lived in, we didn't stay there too long before we moved but during the time we lived in this house, the three room house where Papa made Ellis and Lee sit on the front porch and the back porch.

When we were moving to another house is where I saw my flock of birds come over. They were migrating south and I had never seen that before. The sky was black with birds.

When we got moved into the other house, there was a big oak tree in the front yard and I was out there one day playing on that oak tree and there was a chain hanging down and I put it around me and took a nail and put it in the chain to hold it and I was going to fly like a bird. And I held my arms out and got a running start and circled around the tree and somehow or another my head got to the tree before I did and knocked a hole in my head. My Father, he went and got spider web and alum to put in it to stop the bleeding. And to this day, I still have a hole in my head, a scar on top of my head from it.

After the episode of Papa making liquor on the stove and Mama getting him out of jail, we decided to leave South Carolina. Because the statute of limitation had run out when they were after him before making licker when we lived in Council. I had better clarify that. My Father's profession, rather than a farmer, he ran a turpentine still and a tar kiln where you treated fat light wood and get tar out of it and put in barrels. During the time he was doing this, it creates a lot of smoke and flame and stuff. And he was inhaling that stuff and developed lung problems, so to supplement his income, he was making whiskeywhen he got caught. So, we had to pack up, load up and move down to South Carolina. That is why about three or four of us children were born in South Carolina.

During that time, my Father got a job over in Ft. Jackson, to help building Ft. Jackson, until he fell and hurt his leg. Stuck a spike in his leg, then he had to go back to share cropping, so we had an Uncle Willie down in Cerro Gordo, North Carolina and Mama and them decided to move down there. Cerro Gordo here we come! So we moved down to Cerro Gordo. Millie and Uncle Willie, we moved into a house out in front of a big field. School house near the field.

Then my Daddy, with his lung problem, got worse. Rumor got around that he had TB and we were all treated like lepers at that time. We stayed there in Cerro Gordo a little while. We moved and lived in three different houses at Cerro Gordo. That's when I found out how to get rich. You take a Coca Cola bottle and swap it for a penny in the store.

I remember one time my Mother put a nickel in a slot machine, pulled the handle. She got a jackpot and all those nickels came flying out of that machine and I figured, well this is it. We struck it rich. We will never have to worry about money problems any more but that was only dreaming.

And we moved down beside the railroad track across from the sawmill. We live there about six or eight months and then we moved to another house over on the paved highway which was great because most of the highways were dirt back then.

That's the house where I found out about Dominecker Chickens. We had an old hen that had some biddies and she was around this chimney jam at the side of the house, lying there in the sunshine with her little biddies and I was rolling a hoop around the house and I ran into her. That hen flogged me. I'm telling you, I got whipped up real good.

That's the same place Annie had a little top on the end of a string and she was swinging it around and around and around. That thing came loose and hit me over the eye and cut a place in my eye brow. Well, ironically, about a week later I was pulling her around the house in a wagon and the wagon turned over on her head. And the same eye, same place on her head, hit the corner of the steps and it cut a gash over her eye ans we both still have scars from that.

It wasn't long after that until we left and moved down to Bladenboro, North Carolina, a little town about twelve miles from Lumberton. My Daddy got a job down there in the mill making boxes to pack yarn in. Me and Ellis, Ellis was about, let's see, a young teenager about eleven or twelve years old. He got him a job in the mill and Lee got him one there also. They were both youngans.

I remember being in the bed, a man would come out there and knocked on the door and say, "Mrs. Benson, I come to get them boys to work today". She said, "They've done left for the mill". They didn't show up, he'd tell her. She would come in there and pull me out of a warm bed and have me go and find Lee and Ellis. I remember one time we found them down at the Seaboard Railroad at the switch shooting marbles. She got her a stick and them boys went to work right quick.

We lived at three locations while we were there in Bladenboro. We'd move, it seemed like every time the sun come up, we'd move. We moved back down to Clarkton, that's the place where J. R. was born.

I remember one time my mother told me, "Streetie, run over to Aunt Nell's and get a scrub broom". Back then you'd throw sand on the floor and wet it down and take this big old broom we had, a mop, we had a mop like thing with shucks crammed in a board with a handle on it. So, I went over there to get it and on the way back, I came out to a little watermelon patch and there was a bunch of pretty little watermelons. I picked me a few and stuck them in my pocket. When I got to the house with the broom with the mop, my Mother says, "Streetie, what have you got in your pockets?" I said. "Nothing." She said "Well, give me that mop". So I gave her the mop and I realized what I had done so I threw all those watermelons in the well thinking I would have them hid. For about a week, every time they would draw upa abucket of water, they would draw up a watermelon.

Well, we stayed there for a while and J. R. was born in that house. That was one of the great things that happened to us.

So my Father was sick with his lung problem and we had a chance to move down to Raeford, North Carolina. Aunt Lib, and Sidney and Homer Thompson and all of them were living in that area near Montrose where a sanitarium is at. So we loaded our stuff up. I don't know if we moved in a wagon or what, anyway we moved down to Raeford which is about fifty miles from where we were living. We could go see Daddy in the Sanitarium when he was over there with his TB which they said he had but he didn't have it. On Sunday, it was just 14 miles, on Sundays we would get out and hitch-hike over to see him.

I remember my Daddy, he was dealing with a fish company, J. B. Fales down in Wilmington, North Caroilina. He would order fish from them and the fish would come and we would sell them and then send them their part of the money back. And those things had to come all the way from Wilmington to Raeford just with ice on them and we had to sell them things before the ice melted because it wasn't like it is these days.

That's when we became acquainted with the Stewarts, Bert Stewart and Clarence, Mr. and Mrs. Stewart Law and all them. We got acquainted with them down there.

Ellis, he was still a teenager. We stayed there maybe six months and he got in a fight down at the mill with a fellow named Fred Thompson. Ellis hit him with a trace chain and we left there and we had to pack up and move and so we moved. We moved down to a place called Cumberland, North Carolina. Cumberland was a little yarn mill. Lee and Ellis got them a job down there. We hadn't been there too long before Lee came home one day and said he cut a fellow down there and so we had to move again. We moved back to Bladenboro to the Gilmore White place out on a little road about a mile and a half out of town. That's where my Father got real sick. Mother sent me and Lilly to get Sam Bailey to pray for him. Whenever we had got back, my Father had died. That was a sad day for me because he and I were real close, real close.

So we stayed there a little longer and moved to a place called Brown Marsh Swamp down between Whiteville and Clarkton. Then we stayed there for a while. Aunt Lizzy was living down there, Aunt Lizzy and Harvey and Lilly and that bunch, so we stayed in there a while.

One night there, we were sitting around the house, around the fire. Ellis and them was talking about going and getting some collards; said they knew where a collard patch was. Well, they went to those collards and after a while they come a-running, the door flew open and they came flying into the house. Somebody waylaid them. Ellis called it ambushed, they'd ambushed them. He was really one more mad dude, I'm telling you right now, but never did find out who did it.

You know back in them days, people let their peas get dry on the bush and corn would be in the fields that they didn't get and you could go pick that corn on half's and pick the peas an half's and then give them half of what you picked. You could have the corn ground into meal which we needed very badly and the peas, we got them too. Then, that's the way we survived.

Then we moved back to Saint Paul. Lee and Ellis got them a job in a yarn mill and we stayed there quite a while till hard times caught up with us again, so we moved back down to Bladenboro where Eugene was born. We stayed there a little while. Not too long, but then we moved back down to Duke Fields again.

"Man", Ellis used to say, "Every time the chickens would hear a wagon coming, they would sit down and cross their legs" because that was the way you carried them with you.

So we stayed there a while, then we decided we'd just get out of it. So, we moved over to Lumberton, North Carolina. That was right on the mill hill, right across from this big old dairy farm. Lee and Ellis got them a job down at that mill. Lee was doffing, Ellis, I don't know what he was doing but anyway we stayed there a while.

Something happened down at that mill. I just don't remember what it was. We had to move from there and moved on up toward, closer in town near the tobacco warehouses. I remember my Mother used to tell me, she said, "Streetie", she'd call me and I would go see what she wanted and she'd say, "What about running down town seeing what time it is?". They had a big clock up on the courthouse and I'd play along and go uptown. I'd play along coming back and by the time I got back, I'd forgot what time it was. It disn't matter anyway. We stayed on there for a while.

Lee and Ellis had left home. They'd went up to Rockingham, North Carolina where Aunt Lizzy and them lived. Aunt Lizzy and Paul Bass and them had come to Rockingham. They had got a job at Entwhistle mill no. 1. That's what's known as Aleo. They got a job there making $7.20 a week, and man, they went over to Mr. Will White's Store and hired him to come and get us. They came down to Lumberton and got us and we moved over to Rockingham, North Carolina on 9th Avenue. I remember very well, old three room house. There was about nine of us in a three room house.

When Mother met this man, which I always said was the bravest man I ever seen, to marry a 34 year old widow with a house full of children. Mr. Paul, he was 50 years old and Mama, she was just 34 and they stayed married about 13 years before he died.

But getting back to some of the stuff I overshot, now whenever we lived in Cumberland, I remember me and Annie were around in the back yard playing. Mama had just hung out some clothes on the line and I had a bow and arrow that I'd made. So I told her, I said get hehind them long handle drawers there and hold your hand up there and see if this will go through there, so that's what I did. She got behind that , behind the drawers and I pulled and let it go and it stuck right in the middle of her hand. I sure did hate that

I told you previously about Papa making boxes to put yarn in at the shed over to the plant where he worked. So, whenever he died, they made a box to put him in over at the plant. I went over there and watched them and saw them putting the black cloth on it, tack it on the box that we carried him to Council in. The day we left to carry him over to Council, we put him on an old bed truck and us children sat around on the outside of the truck and held up our feet and he was in a box in the middle of it.

Carried him through Clarkton down to Council Station and buried him and that;s been a long time ago. I remember whenever we lived in Duke Field place that he would get fish on the train from J. B. Felds in Wilmington and he and I would get out and sell those fish down in the country before the ice melted cause once the ice melted, man that was it, you had some rotten fish on your hands. And we'd go, Ellis, Lee and myself, when we lived at Duke Field place, would go out in the woods and cut wood, haul it to Clarkton and sell it for a dollar's worth of groceries or something in order to have something to eat. Lee and Ellis, they fell the trees and pulled the saw back and forth. And I was the kerosene boy. I had kerosene in a Coca-Cola bottle with some pine needles stuck in it and I would keep the saw wet so it wouldn't be hard to pull.

Whenever we lived there in Bladenboro, in the place where Papa died, it was Arch White's Father, they had a chufer field out back. I don't know if you know what a Chufers are or not, but looks like nut grass with a little seed on the bottom of it and it's real sweet once it lays out in the sunshine and the sun cures it out. That was in a place that belonged to Mr. Gilmore White and he had tgree big old sycamore trees in the front yard. I've climbed those trees a many a time.

While we were living there, Mama and Ellis and Lee were working in Bladenboro on the one side of Bladenboro and I went over there to watch them work and Lee and Ellis were helping them to move a smoke house or something and they uncovered a chicken nest full of eggs so I got me some of those things and put them in my pocket to take them home with me. On the way home there in Bladenboro, I looked off the little bridge and I saw a bunch of little small turtles down there with little yellow specks on them. I got down and crawled off on the edge of that bridge and forgot about the eggs in my pocket until I had egg running down my leg and that was a very humble (experience) and it wasn't funny either.

This recording was some of the things I remember back in my lifetime from the time I first started remembering up until early October 28, 1929.