The Great Depression; Interview with John Twist. Part 2

Speed. Mark. Take three marker. Okay. Okay. You can tell me. There was a fish in the rivers, called the alligator gar, was such an ugly, tough, inedible fish that people wouldn't eat the gar normally. I remember one summer when the river fell suddenly overnight and a large number of immense six and seven foot long gars were trapped in a spur of the river because they couldn't swim out and were found there in the, just in the mud flat of the spur. And people in the 30s were so desperate for food, for meat, that as the story got around that there were these immense ugly gars

lying in that mud flat dying, that people came from all around and walked out in the mud flat to hack off pieces of these gars, although they would normally not eat that fish. They were so hungry. They were so desperate that the sight of seeing all these people walking around, competing with each other to find a gar that wasn't dead yet, to cut up, to hack off some of his flesh to carry home to cook. And it was just, it was a pitiful sight to see the people eating the alligator gar. Can you tell me about your job as a water boy for the Twist Farm and what you did, how much you got paid? All right, yes. When I was 10 years old, I spent the summer on my horse.

That's really, that was a wonderful time for me. In a way, as 10 years old, I could not understand, I could not appreciate the poverty, the pain, the hunger of the people. I saw them as all wonderful, friendly, loving, affectionate people who were nice to children, so they were nice to me. And there would, I would get a job every summer. I was paid 50 cents a day to be a water boy. I had my horse, all I wanted to do was ride my horse all day anyhow. And my job would be to take a couple of kegs, water kegs, small enough to hook over the horn of my saddle. And I would go to a nearby hand pump, prime the pump, and fill the two kegs with water, hook the kegs over

the horn of my saddle, and ride back out to a cotton-chopping crew, a crew maybe of 20 or 30 people who were chopping, who were hoeing the cotton in the company crop. And somebody had to bring them water on a regular basis. And I would just walk in, or ride in among the cotton-choppers, and they would unhook the keg and have a drink and hook it back. And when all the water was drunk, I would go back to the pump and fill it up and come back again. And in that way, I came to know most of the people on the farm. I knew them by their names, and they knew me, and we were good friends. And it was a lovely time for me. I didn't understand at that time how much suffering they were enduring. The Depression didn't exist for me except from what I could hear.

I see. Now you were ten years old, so did you go to school with the sons and daughters of sharecroppers? No. Actually, the plantation was large enough to be its own school district. It had only one taxpayer, and that was the plantation. The funds that came into the school district were paid to an adjoining school district to bus the white children into the town to school. And the Twist school district paid a fee for each child to be educated in the nearby town. There was no arrangement for the blacks. There were one or two school teachers who were

not trained. I suppose they were more babysitters than anything else. And there was a school on the plantation for the black children, and when they came there. But so often they were kept in the field to help the work through the harvest. They didn't go to school. They may go to school sometime during the winter if it wasn't too muddy and too disagreeable to get to the school. In the spring, they went back to the fields to work. So school for the black children on the plantation was pitiful. It was almost nonexistent. How come the disparity, white children were bussed off to school and black children were left to mostly fend for themselves? That was just the times. That's the way it was. Black children didn't get to go to school. They certainly didn't go to school with the white children. And the black schools, I'm sure, varied a great deal from the city to the country. But many, most black children in the country did not get an education, did not become literate.

In terms of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, can you tell me a little but about the act and also how it was decided that the money was going to be split up? When Roosevelt came in, he passed through Congress the Agricultural Adjustment Act, I think in 1933. And it was designed to bring some relief to this dreadful situation in the rural South. One of its principles was to curtail the production of cotton. In that first year, people were paid to plow up some of the cotton. To get the bill through Congress, Roosevelt had to make

certain concessions. He thought that any funds paid by the Agricultural Adjustment Act should be paid half to the landlord and half to the tenant. The Southern congressmen were not going to stand for that. They refused to pass a bill on that basis. They told Mr. Roosevelt that if he insisted on that, he'd get no bill at all. And if he got no bill at all, chaos was going to reign. Why did the Southern Democrats, why did the Democrats refuse to go along with something that did a 50-50 split? Well, of course, they were responsible to their voters, and that would be the white man.

The white people were going to vote them in or out of office. And they could tell Roosevelt, look, you won't get any bill at all unless you design it our way. And here's why you should do it our way. If you insist on half the money going to the tenant, to the sharecropper, then the landlord will just kick them all off. And work the cotton as a day crop, as a company crop. And he'll just hire them for work when he wants to hire them, but he won't furnish them for a crop. And you've got a worse situation. So I think, as I understand it then, Roosevelt agreed that 90% of the money would be paid as rent to the landlord, and 10% would be paid to the tenant. Then, by the time the bill was passed in Congress and got down to the county level, the county committees, which were all white, made an addendum that any money paid to the tenant would be paid to the landlord in behalf of the tenant. And could be applied to his debt, if there was a debt, rather than to be paid as cash. So it ended up the tenant got no relief in that way.

But the Adjustment Act did have this effect. It immediately pushed cotton out of the four and five cent level to the seven and eight, nine cent a pound level. So that it did have a tremendous, it brought a tremendous relief to the economy, by almost doubling the price of cotton there in a year's time. Last time you said as time went on, there was increasing pressure to give the tenant more of the parity payment. What kind of pressure, where did that come from? I don't remember. Oh, roll out. Okay, all right. I don't remember it quite that way, did I say that? Yeah, that's what I took from the pre-interview, but maybe I got it wrong.

Oh, it might have been, I don't know. Okay, that's the end of camera roll 81, 82. So next, our next take will be take four. I'm sorry. What are we going to talk about now? The Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Oh yeah. Yeah. Speed. Marker, take four. As to the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Do you mind just saying it all? The Southern Tenant Farmers Union, I heard about as a boy. I know very little about it. I know that there were efforts to organize the sharecropper. What I could hear from the white people, they were just, it was a horrible idea. It would go nowhere. It was communistic, and it was only going to just make things worse for everybody.

I did hear of a race riot down in Elaine, Arkansas, and I think I did hear that one of the founders of the union came from Tyronza, Arkansas, which was not terribly far from our farm. But I didn't know personally anything about the Tenant Farmers Union. What were they trying to do? I suppose they were just trying to better the life of the sharecropper, I guess to get a better deal for him, get some kind of, by striking, just forcing a better contract for the sharecropper, as far as I know. Did you ever hear about any of the strikes that they called?

I heard about some strike down in Elaine, Arkansas, but I didn't know anything about it. Jane must have really taken that phone off the hook, because it would have rung by now. That was take four, take five is next. I guess before we start up, is there anything else that you can tell me about the union that you can think of? I really can't. What I'm going to ask you to do then next is to describe Earl. The nearest town was the town of Earl, Arkansas. It had, I think, about maybe 2,500 people, half white, half black. It was a small agricultural town.

It was about 30 miles from Memphis. It was mainly a cotton ginner's town. There were three or four cotton gins. The richest people in town would be the people who owned the cotton gins. They would furnish the small farmer, or make advances to the small farmer for his crop in gin his cotton, and quite often buy his cotton from him there at the gin. Can you tell me about Paul Peacher, whose nickname I understand was Peaches? Oh, yes. The town marshal of Earl was an infamous man by the name of Peacher. I think in 1935, he was convicted in federal court of peonage for operating a farm outside of Earl, where he used people he had arrested and had sentenced in the city court.

He would use these people to work his farm outside of town. He was notorious because in the 1930s, we had so many people who began to hit the roads all across the South. They were vagabonds. They were hobos. They were beggars. They came to the back doors of the people asking for a meal, asking for some work they might be able to do. These people that were vagrants, they were considered undesirables because I think they threatened the security of the town people. And so their police officers were told to discourage this vagrancy.

The way they discouraged, they just arrested them as soon as they showed up in town. People like Peacher would arrest them and see that they were sent up to his farm to work his crop. As I say, he was later found to be convicted of peonage. Now last time we had talked a little bit about Peacher, you said, you had met him a couple of times, and he was okay toward you, but if you had been black, you wouldn't have felt that way. Yes. Can you explain to me Peacher and the difference. Yes. If you met Peacher on the street, you would think he was a very nice man. He had the most beautiful daughter in town. I remember that. She was two or three years older than me. But he was a terror on the other side of town, across the railroad tracks. Any time there was some sort of fracas, disturbance, Peacher would have to go over there and restore peace and quiet.

And when he came in the place, he might, with his blackjack, restore tranquility pretty quickly. He was a terror, a terror for the black people of the town. He just demanded immediate obedience. He demanded compliance with his orders, or he would just work them over with the blackjack. He was a terrible, terrible man. On his prison farm, was it more black than white? It was all black, best I remember. It was all black. I don't really believe he had white people on his prison farm, but I'm not sure about that. He could be very cruel, even to young white vagabonds, people drifting through the town. He could be pretty terrible. There was a story I heard about. There wasn't Peacher, but it was another police officer in the same county.

He stopped a young white boy walking down the highway and asked him where he was going and what he was doing there. Then the boy would answer, a young man, say maybe twenty, twenty-five years old. This story went around the county. The officer said, I can't hear your answer. Come in a little closer. The boy was required to stick his head inside the window. The officer just rolled the glass up under the young man's chin and said, listen, if you break my glass, it's going to cost you a hundred dollars and you're going to have to work it out at fifty cents a day in prison. Now, you just, don't you move and break my glass, or that's what's going to happen to you.

Then he whips him with his blackjack, with the guy's head caught inside the car. Then when he gets through, he releases him and he says, now you tell all your buddies, don't ever come into this county. You pass the word, all you hobos, that's what's going to happen to any of you. That was take five, take six is next. I remember my grandfather saying that he knew at the start of the year that he was going to lose fifty thousand dollars.

By the end of the year, he would lose fifty thousand dollars more than he'd already lost. The landlords were going broke. Fifty thousand dollars in those days was a lot of money. He knew that there was no way for him to feed the people and sell from a crop enough to get his money back. He knew that to start with. I remember those remarks were made inside the family. I think the big misunderstanding, the myth is that the landlords, if they hadn't been so stingy, so cruel, so mean, the sharecroppers would have had a very happy, idyllic life. They could have lived well. It's just not true.

Everybody, the Great Depression was destroying the whole rural economy. Anybody who owned land was going broke. If he had to advance money based on four or five cent cotton, people could not live on a hundred dollars a year. The family could not live on a hundred dollars a year. Yet they had to be fed to work the crop another year. So everybody lived on the hope that things would get better. Of course, President Roosevelt did begin to improve the situation in 1933. From then on, the conditions did improve. Can you tell me the story again about the sheriff from Crittenden County? There was a story that went around Crittenden County that one of the law enforcement officers— You want to do it again?

Okay, that's the end of camera roll 315-82. And that was take six. Take—and that's the end of the sound roll, too. Goodbye.