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R: Tell us about that.
D: The first I remembered was being a small child living there, because it
made an impression on me. The Fleishmann's, the yeast-people, bought one of
the big plantations for a hunting place and the ladies in Tallahassee, being
southern ladies, tried to find out what day Mrs. Fleishmann would be home so
that they could call. She had no phone, and she sent word that she did not
care to know the villagers. Twenty-five years later, when I went back to
Tallahassee to live and had welfare cases on the plantations, I discovered...
R: 'Black people had been allowed to live there all of those years?
D: With the understanding they plant crops that the wild animals, the deer,
and the turkeys would eat. The negroes had very little to eat. Sweet
potatoes, beans, and corn were planted, but the deer usually got that.
They were trying to get help from the welfare, and yet I remember going
to the owner of the plantations when somebody was ill. They were glad
to take them into a hospital because that was tax deductible.
R: Anything that was tax deductible was I suppose...
D: But they weren't interested in trying to fix it so that people could make
a living.
R: And they probably lived in terrible shacks.
D: Yes, and of course they said, "They're no good" because we've got all this
lumber somewhere if they come and get it.,; Well,they didn't have any
particular way to get it. And when you'reso underfed you don't have the
ambition.
R: And their house was probably a very low level.
D: It was. Of course in those days, they were just beginning to find out they
could cure with pennicillin, and so many of them were ill. In fact.
one of my many jobs at the welfare agency was to go to the jail every
morning to get an interview with the prostitutes before we sent them off
to be cured and rehabilitated, only it didn't work.
R: Well, before penicillin, they tried to kill syphilis with a drug called
666. It was, I believe, a natural compound. Those were
very hard days for black people in the South, and the death rate among
infants was enormous.
D: Once we started to give them the shots, they didn't want them because they
were afraid they'd get pregnant. They didn't have birth control. They
didn't understand what syphilis would do to them. But when they kept
saying they want to have babies, I kept questioning them.
R: Syphilis is a dreadful form of population control.
D: Emma, I hadn't realized that you had been a social worker.
You seem to me to have never done social work. I won't go into
social-type work.