The Great Depression; Interview with Clay East. Part 1

INTERVIEWER:

OK. Mr. East, I want to start off talking about the Norcross Plantation. We talked a little bit about it yesterday. So, can you tell me what conditions were like on the Norcross Plantation?

CLAY EAST:

Conditions were all right until Norcross died, got killed on his horse, got his neck broke. A horse got scared of a car, and he was coming to town and the horse got scared and threw him off, and broke his neck. That's when Hiram, his son, who was an attorney for Portland Cement Company in Kansas City, he come down and took charge of the farm, and he sold it to a cousin of mine, 1900 acres. And the bottom dropped out...in the meantime, he took a mortgage on my cousin's nice farm and home and everything up there. He took a mortgage on it, besides it and $20000 cash, so when the bottom dropped out of this cotton and my cousin couldn't make his payments, he took the whole thing. When he did, he was strictly business. He drew up a contract for all of the sharecroppers and took an account of everything he let them have to work the land with. He didn't allow 'em to have a cow or chickens or anything. He had this land measured, and where my cousin would guess at it, he had it surveyed, and when he got it through, there wasn't enough for land to go around, so he just took some of thems crop that had already been started, and he just kicked off a whole bunch of these tenants out there, to make it so they'd have just exactly what they're supposed to have. At that time, before he took it over, and I guess afterward, tenant farmers was furnished so much a month for the amount of land he was allowed so much a month during the crop season. After the crop season was over, they didn't get anything.

INTERVIEWER:

Now this furnishment that Norcross and the other plantation owners provided, tell me about how they would get this furnish, about how they would go to the store, and the plantation owner would own the store, and all that. So, can you explain that to me?

CLAY EAST:

They ordinarily would go the bank, and get the money, borrow the money from the bank in a lot of cases. In a lot of cases the owner furnished it, and maybe gave them a discount, so they'd make money off of that, too.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, now, tell me a little bit more about the Norcross plantation, you told me that it was real big, but how large it was, and how much he paid his sharecroppers and tenants, and so forth.

CLAY EAST:

You don't pay sharecroppers, they get half of the—

INTERVIEWER:

Hang on, one second, one second, can you start that over again? Let me remind you, yesterday you said something about, they pay you 40 cents a day? Who was doing that?

CLAY EAST:

Well, that was generally a big store. Some of them had their own stores, and store, a merchant there in town would furnish them as guaranteed by the landowner. He'd give these folks a furnish, whatever it was, so much for the amount of land they had, as I told you before. They, it was furnished on the amount of acreage they had, see, that's the furnish they got a month.

INTERVIEWER:

That's good, this is good. Can you tell me a little bit more about Hiram Norcross, Jr., how different he was from his father?

CLAY EAST:

Well, his father was a good man and a friend to everyone. There was an old man who borrowed a thousand dollars for him, from him, Old Man Joe Davis, and in the fall of the year he went to old Hiram, that's the old man, was going to pay him his thousand dollars. The old man told him, Joe, he said, I know you're pretty hard up and didn't have much of a crop, you can just let that ride and pay me next year. He never was able to pay him, but he was that kind of person, he would help other people. That is Hiram's daddy, the one who got killed.

INTERVIEWER:

Now, Hiram Jr., he wasn't that kind of person, tell me about him.

CLAY EAST:

Oh no, he was strictly business.

INTERVIEWER:

Can you give me an example? Other than the fact that he took your cousin's...

CLAY EAST:

Well, he had those contracts, as I told you. The old man just took people's word for stuff, but he had a written contract and a sharecropper on his place had to sign this thing, and his tools and everything was checked to him, and when they quit or something happened to him, they had to, it was checked to see that the owner, which was young Norcross, got all this stuff back, and if he didn't have any of it, he had to pay for it.

INTERVIEWER:

Now, when the government, the triple A, asked the planters, or the owners, to plow their crops under, and they paid them?

CLAY EAST:

Yeah.

INTERVIEWER:

Now, yesterday you told me a story about how some of the tenants and sharecroppers came to you and complained. Can you tell me that story again, from the very beginning?

CLAY EAST:

Yeah. I was the law. In fact, well, I was a marshal, constable, and deputy sheriff in this little town, and the folks all trusted me, and when they couldn't get any help, they'd come to me to see if I could help them out.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, but you have to tell me why they were coming to you. Again, remember, we have to assume that people don't know anything, so you have to tell me that, the planters didn't share the money like they were supposed to, and then they came to me for help.

CLAY EAST:

That's right.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, but can you tell that back to me so I have it on film?

CLAY EAST:

Well, that's—they come to me because they figured I could help them get their money, that the guy that owned the land had the check for. He was the one who got the check, they didn't get it. They made the crop, but he got the check, so they didn't have anything to go on, and it was never stipulated in the government contract says it has to be settled between the sharecropper and the owner. He was sitting there with the check in his hand, and had all the advantages. Some of them would claim that the cropper didn't finish his deal because he didn't have to pick the cotton, didn't have to get his crops, so he hadn't actually finished it. Yet the cropper, then, claimed that he had finished his part of it, which he had.

INTERVIEWER:

—stop, because we're out of film, but this is good—

INTERVIEWER:

OK, Mr. East, now, you were going to tell me about how the government person came to claim the crop reduction.

CLAY EAST:

Well, after this legislation was passed about the plow-up, the government had to send a man in there to explain to the farmers about what they were supposed to do, and so forth, the rules and all on that. Well, they didn't have a meeting for the whites and a meeting for the blacks, they had all of them together. So, when the union thing came up, I didn't think there was any argument to it. In fact, there wasn't. We just didn't argue about it, but on account of that, we figured it, well, the only the thing we could do was to have an integrated meeting, and that was what I got up and told them. It didn't, the question, you might say, never came up, about that thing. I explained to them, we was all eating the same food and doing the same kind of work, and so forth, and that we should all meet together, it's the only way they could handle it.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, that's good. We'll talk about that some more a little later on, but that's good. Now, you were also going to tell me about how the croppers came to you for help, when the owners didn't share the triple A payments.

CLAY EAST:

Well, that's right, in a small township like that, the only—

INTERVIEWER:

Can you say, excuse me, can you say, in a small township like Tyronza?

CLAY EAST:

Tyronza Township, yeah. It was only—

INTERVIEWER:

Mr. East, hang on just a second, and I'm sorry to keep on interrupting you, but we just have to have a little space from the time that I stop talking to the time that you begin, because I'm not going to be here. This is your show; we don't want my voice on it. So, if you could start from the beginning and say, \"In a small town like Tyronza,\" and then we'll just go on from there.

CLAY EAST:

Are you ready for—

INTERVIEWER:

Yes.

CLAY EAST:

In a small town like Tyronza, it was called Tyronza Township, there was only two branches of law, that was the JP's and the constable, so I was constable elected, and then I was appointed by the sheriff as a deputy, and I was appointed by the mayor as a marshal, so I was really the law, and people come to me when they needed help. Wasn't anyone else to go to. So that's when I wrote to Washington, and told them what was happening down there, that landowners, or a lot of them, was keeping all of that money, and we wanted kind of a, some kind of understanding about it. So they sent a man down there called Green, from Washington, and he came down there and said, asked me, well, he wanted to see me, 'cause I was the leader, and he asked me, \"What is it you boys want?\" And when I started to tell him about how these folks were being mistreated, he told me he was only interested in violations of this Acreage Reduction Program. He said that he didn't, at that time he didn't know of it or not, I told him, \"I'll bring you up. Come here in the morning and I'll bring you up a list of violations.\" So, when he got there the next morning, I'd got out that day, I only had a short time, and got eight of these different farms that had so many houses the year before and less this year, less tenants, and so forth. He told us, he had the commissioners with him when he came in there, and I told him I'd give him the violations, so he had the country commissioners with him and they was the landowners. He told them, after he'd read this thing I'd gave him, this was all typed off, eight separate violations there, farmers names and their tenants and everything on it. So he read, he read these things, and about the first thing that he read off was Old Man Sloan, I can't remember his name, I mean, his first, given name, but the way he talked, they was really scared, they thought he was going to do something. He turned right 'round then and goes to Memphis, and he had a Commercial Appeal reporter with him, he was there, and he went into Memphis and reported to the Commercial Appeal that they found no violations, so that just left us with nothing to go on. I might say, then, he didn't mention to me that he was going, or anything, but Mitch got a group together and went to Washington, and he saw some of the legislators up there, and some of them were for him and the boys, the sharecroppers. They never did anything about it, they just let it ride, so I don't know how those folks ever got settled up on it. Some of the farmers were on the level and paid off, like they were supposed to, they...

INTERVIEWER:

Now, when Mitch went to Washington, did the croppers think that something was going to happen? Did they think something was going to change for them, that they were going to get their money?

CLAY EAST:

I don't think but very few of them knew anything about it, because he didn't say anything. He just got this group together and put them in his car. He didn't mention it to me that he was going, or anything, so I don't know what the result, and I know that...Secretary of...

INTERVIEWER:

Agriculture?

CLAY EAST:

Wallace, he was Secretary of the United States...something.

INTERVIEWER:

Secretary of Agriculture?

CLAY EAST:

Yeah.

INTERVIEWER:

Could you tell me that, \"Secretary of Agriculture Wallace,\" and then tell me the story?

CLAY EAST:

Well, yeah, he saw him, and he was disappointed in—

INTERVIEWER:

Mr. East, again, I'm sorry to have to interrupt you, but, I need for you to tell me that Mitch saw Secretary of Agriculture Wallace, and then tell me the story. I have to have you tell me that, again, because my sound's not going to be on here, you're the only one that has a mic.

CLAY EAST:

Well, he saw Secretary of Labor—

INTERVIEWER:

Of Agriculture.

CLAY EAST:

Of Agriculture, yeah.

INTERVIEWER:

Just, I need for you to just say it all over again.

CLAY EAST:

He was disappointed in him because, instead of signing up with us boys, he sided in with the planters. Outcome of that, I never did know. It wasn't anything good, I can tell you that. Certainly never done anything about it, and I don't know how they ever got to, their checks settled.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, now—

INTERVIEWER:

We have to change again and get some more film.

CLAY EAST:

OK.

INTERVIEWER:

This is going good, though. It's going good.