♪ Oh-ooooooh! Sometime I feel all right ♪
♪ Darling sometime I feel so blue ♪
♪ But I come out here to here to tell ya ♪
♪ About something I got... ♪
My name is Fannie Washington and I'm a 100 years old.
Maya: You were about say 99, you just turned 100.
[applause]
- Thank you. - It looks amazing.
Maya: Everybody, she's a celebrity!
Fannie: I'm a 100.
Fannie: You're my granddaughter.
Maya: Your great granddaughter.
Fannie: Great granddaughter.
- You're drinking soda pop? - Soda pop, aka beer.
Maya: Where are you from?
Fannie: Clarksdale, Mississippi.
Maya: And what year were you born?
Fannie: 1916.
Maya: A lot of these kids are born in like 90s,
2000s, and we live in the city.
So what is it like growing up in Clarksdale?
I grew up on a plantation.
The name of the plantation was Cane and Anderson Plantation.
In the country we were living on a white man's farm.
And my parents raised cotton and corn.
And we had to always go out in the field
and chop the grass from around it.
When the cotton got old enough we picked cotton.
Maya: Was it easier on your hands? Was it hard work?
Fannie: It was hard on your hands
because you had to go into those -- the bowl.
A lot of times the bowl would be up over the [unintelligible].
Every time you put your hand in there
you got stuck all around your fingers.
Maya: Oh, like thorns?
Like a thorn bush or something like that.
My grandfather didn't make no money,
because at the end of the settlement
he said, "Well, George Sam, you did pretty good.
But you still owe us $500."
Maya: At the end of what?
The season of picking cotton.
Maya: Oh.
So you would get a sack of cotton
and get a few quarters?
It was 50 cents a hundred.
Maya: For a hundred what? A hundred pounds?
- Uh-huh. - Oh.
50 cents a hundred.
Maya: That's a lot of cotton.
Fannie: Bent over all day in the field.
Pick on this side and pick on this side.
Maya: How many people were working on the plantation?
Oh my gosh, it's so many I can't even tell you.
Maya: Like 100? More?
More than a 100.
You know at a plantation, it's like a city.
Maya: Oh wow.
Fannie: I came to Chicago to better my condition.
Maya: Why Chicago?
Well at the time when you're young
and people has radio,
there wasn't no television out those days.
But a lot of people had the radio
and a lot of times they would tell that --
tell about the news
and the weather between Memphis and Chicago,
a different little town that you hear about.
And then you know about these different little towns.
Maya: Oh okay, so you heard about it through the radio?
Yeah.
Do you consider yourself as an American?
Yeah I am American.
Maya: You are American.
Yeah, I consider myself a colored person.
Maya: A colored person?
Yeah, a colored person, a colored human being.
Did they call everyone colored?
They called us colored people.
Maya: Okay.
When did they switch over from colored people to black people?
Well they just, you know, to tell you the truth
they just started calling people black
I guess because there was a lot of African people
in the United States back in those days.
There was Africans and then there was Americans?
Fannie: Yeah.
Maya: And they spoke a different language?
Oh yeah, because you couldn't understand their language.
Maya: Oh really? I didn't know that.
So on the plantation you'd have Americans
and then you'd have Africans.
Fannie: Uh-huh.
Maya: Would you say there's been
a lot of change and progress for people of color?
- Oh yeah. - Oh yeah?
Oh yeah. You want to know why? The white men.
The white men didn't respect the colored men.
And he would go over to his wife and get babies.
There's a lot colored women that got pregnant from white men.
And keep the whole plantation from knowing
that the baby is white,
they'd send it up north they'd call it.
Maya: Up north where? Fannie: Here.
Maya: Here to Chicago? Fannie: Mm-hmm.
Get them out of Mississippi.
Maya: Get them out, why?
Well, it's -- amongst the colored women it was a disgrace.
It was shameful,
a white man want to get baby by colored women.
And that's why you find so many colored people,
that you call, is very light skinned.
In the South they used to call them a mulatto.
Maya: Oh okay, yeah. Fannie: Yeah.
If you was a riding a bus and the white people rode it too
and there was a lady got on, she was pregnant,
so there wasn't nobody sitting in that seat,
and she sat down, when the white men got on the bus
he told her she had to go in the back and sit.
I wish it had been I.
I would sit down with colored men.
He said, "Hey, you better be quiet."
I said, "That's what wrong with the world now,
you're too damn quiet."
If I had education I would have been dead a long time ago.
Maya: Why do you say that?
Because I can't stand white people
the way they used to treat colored people.
And there's a rule they said,
"There's only two people in the world free.
It's a colored woman and a white man."
They the only two people.
The white woman is not free. She's not -- no.
Maya: Why do you say that?
Because she can't go out with no colored man, mm-mm.
The first thing they do is they'd hang him.
Maya: So are you proud of the progress that we've made?
Oh you better believe it. You better believe it.
I am one of them.
What kind of food do you eat?
Number one, I have to have my greens.
Turnip greens, mustard greens,
cabbage green, spinach. What else?
My bowels won't do right if I don't have my greens.
Maya: Okay. So greens?
Fannie: That's right, I have to have them greens.
Mary-Louise my granddaughter she's a green eater.
Same thing with her. She have to have her greens.
Do you drink?
Fannie: Never.
Yeah you do drink!
- Beer. - Beer, yes.
I don't drink alcohol.
Maya: Oh okay, why?
I tried it one time and I got drunk off of it.
It went to my head and I was acting silly and stupid.
And I stopped.
Any words of encouragement?
Do you have any words of encouragement?
If I need money to help to hear myself,
if I saw men or somebody tearing up the bricks out there,
making them nice so they can use them again, I'll join them.
Because I like to be paid so I can have money to help myself.
Maya: What is the secret to staying youthful?
You're a 100 years old, you don't look a 100.
The only thing I can tell anybody
that I try to treat everybody nicely.
Now that you treat me like I treat you.
Be nice to me, be kind.
You want to do something real smart with your life.
You want to live a good life,
like other people that you have saw around you.
Work and save some of your money and spend some.
That's the way I do.
What advice do you have for young people of color?
When you have a child -- a baby,
it starts when its born to teach that child,
and he'll never get away from his dream.
Continue to teach him all the way up.
No, no, be nice. You can't get away with that.
You've got to have the guts
to control your tempers and everything else.
I ain't going to let nobody run over me, even not now.
You treat me like I treat you, and that's a human being.
You look at my eyes, and you don't see me scared --
Like the kids say, "You don't see me scurred."
Maya: [laughs] Scurred.
♪ ♪
Maya: Well we'll eat after.
She's going to get her nails did.
That's pretty, I like that. So glittery!
- You like'em? - Yeah.
Fannie: They're beautiful.
Maya: How does it feel to be a 100?
Fannie: I feel fine to be a 100.
Maya: You're a century years old.
I'm going to Africa granny.
Fannie: Uh-uh. Maya: Yeah.
Fannie: Okay [unintelligible]
[laughter]
Watching this, "Why I Can't Get a Man" with granny.