D. Biben: *windchimes in the breeze* *sound fades out*
I’m David Biben. It’s a plantation, so we have to understand that I’m mixed, I’m
mixed. And you know my mama was working for the white people and that’s the way it turned
out to be. Growing up, yeah, we had to work in the field,
go to school and that takes maybe four months out of the year through seventh or eighth
grade, I think. The man who owned the plantation they would bring them [the teachers] in, we
didn’t had no choice. But you take what they give you. They had free lunches. We walked
from downtown New Roads back to town to go to school every day, every evening, we had
to walk there, and we had to walk back to the bus and catch the bus back, very rough.
Yeah, they had revival, yeah, they would. Yeah, there were twenty or so, Ernest Gaines
and his brother, there were about fifteen of us, got baptized you know at that church.
Well you know, church every Sunday until they stopped us from going, not really stop, if
you danced or something like that, you can’t belong to church.
I remember being a little boy, I guess I was about five and a half, we’d take pictures
you know that was the only time we’d get our pictures taken, and my mama brought me
at a state fair. You know they had whites in there and black part. That’s about it
as far as fairs are concerned. Yeah, Mardi Gras, mama, grandmother would
make the hats for us, you know, hat and suits and stuff like that and we would put suits
on and get your whip and get on your horse and if you had a good horse, you know, a fast
horse, some would rear, and jump with you and popping your whip at people. *laughs*
That and go to somebody’s house and eat gumbo or something like that. Or chicken,
stewed chicken or something like that. Get a big meal, get on your horse and go on, used
to go down to Elmore and Pitcher Quarters. Yeah, they had a big store. You would come
down Cherie Lane, not on the river side but on this side and you turn left, and the big
store was on the side, the big house sit here and they all sit here and the store sit there.
When my father died, that was it you know the farm just split up but wow, nobody had
jobs. In the country, driving a tractor when you’re one person, a couple acres of land
but you might have had twenty people with hoes. The white people all had tractors and
stuff like that. All I remember three, three black people [had tractors] and basically
black people work for the white people and some of them tried to farm.
Well when you’re going down the quarters on the left hand side, well they farm their
own land. We worked for them and on this side, they were rented out. They [the white people]
live on the river and all the black people they live down in the quarters.
We had a basically a whole house. I’ve never known my family to have a separate house.
They all, we lived on one side and the other side was open too for us. If they were farmers
they had that, but like us, we weren’t farmers as such. I used to work with my uncle, now
maybe that’s why we could get a house out here because I would help my uncle and he
was a farmer and I was helping him. That’s the only thing I could think of.
We used to eat out the river. Now, when mama said go get supper and that what I would do,
dig baits, dig worms out the ground and put them in a cup and go out the river and catch
supper. Go out and eat in the late afternoon, catch a mess of fish and get home at any time.
Most were brim, catfish and brim, crawfish sometimes.
She had rice all the time, kept rice, flour, cornmeal, ‘coons and rabbits and squirrels.
They had a catalog come in and you order your chicken and mostly roosters, they’d fool
you with that rooster. *laughs* Let them grow up, then you kill them and eat them. Some
people had duck, geese and would raise one or two hogs a year.
Yeah, we’d kill them hogs and scrape and clean, all the hair off of them and gut them,
whatever, and make cracklins and other parts of them were cooked for inviting everybody
around to butcher it and give them a piece of meat but you had to give everybody a piece
of meat you know. So, you had no hog when you got through, it was all gone. That’s
a good time too. Interviewer; Cheylon Woods: That’s’ a
good time? D. Biben: Oh, man. *laughs*
*windchimes and songbirds sound* *sound fades out*