*Intro Music* E. Shields: I’m Elvin Lee Shields. Now,
the Lee part, most of my brothers and sisters have a middle name of Lee. When you were growing
up in the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s and born in those times, I was born on Melrose Plantation
in December 1948. Believe it or not, we were still part of the Confederacy in 1948.
Everybody who grew up on the plantation, you had to pay homage to Robert E. Lee. And you’ll
find a lot of black people born during Jim Crow in the 30’s and 40’s and 50’s,
was naming their children Lee. A lot of them changed it to Leroy. You’ll find a lot of
blacks named Leroy. It wasn’t never Leroy, it was Lee. They changed it to Leroy because
they didn’t want to honor Robert E. Lee. And I said, okay Lee, so that’s part of
my middle name which I never use, I just use the L.
But a lot of my brothers and sisters have Lee in it because we all was born on plantations
and if you’re born on a plantation, you go along to get along back then because that
was during the time of Jim Crow. It was still slavery, illegal but it was still slavery.
But anyway, I was born in December 1948 at Melrose Plantation. I was the youngest boy
but there are three young girls below me and then the rest are above me. So, it was like
seven older than me, so we were like end generation. I’ve got brothers and sisters twenty years
older than me. I have nephews and nieces almost my age.
So, this was one big family of people living on a plantation and we remained on Melrose
Plantation as sharecroppers until 1954, we moved in that house. I was five years old
when we moved there. And I was in the cotton fields since I was three or four years old.
From that place, there was another slave cabin across the road, there were about six more
slave cabins along the river scattered here. Then as you go down another mile, there was
eight or ten other slave cabins scattered along another trail. And we would call them
“turn rows.” You know it was a little dirt road and there were little cabins spotted
all along there. We was all sharecroppers. These were sharecropper
families and the average sharecropper family had eight kids. That’s an average, some
had twelve, some had sixteen and if you had boys, you were much richer because boys could,
you know, harvest more cotton than the girls. But the girls were also doing that also. But
that was life living here on Oakland Plantation. No one lived on Cane River period. No one
lived on the river except sharecroppers. There was nothing along the river, but alligators
and moccasins and snakes. Nobody from the city wanted to be tied to the river. So, it
was all here. As we sit here, from here to the other side,
there were about ten cabins like this right in eyeshot across the river. They were all
full of kids. As you walked down Bermuda Road, there were another thirty as you walked all
the way to St. Paul Church. Another thirty of these little cabins dotted through the
fields, all black people, all sharecroppers living.
You would have, this being the Bermuda community, I would say you had about close to three hundred
people in the Bermuda community who was all black. Some of them born here, died here,
lived here their whole life. But after the mechanization of farm labor, as the plantation
owners made enough money to buy a piece of mechanized equipment, so you didn’t need
them anymore, and you simply just asked them to leave. You would get a knock on the door,
say, “we no longer need you guys, so by Wednesday, I’m going to remove this cabin
to plant more cotton, so you got that time to gather up your stuff and you leave.
If you had two hundred people on your plantation, you bought your first tractor, you lost maybe
20 %. You bought your second tractor, you lost another 20%. When you bought your cotton
machine, you lost 40 %, you see. After all the big plantations got cotton machines, you
had maybe 20 % of all the sharecroppers living on the plantation left.
Now the only reason why these two slave shacks still here is that they were domestic workers
in the big house, they were guys who learned to drive and operate the machinery and their
families would stay here. But you still had corn harvesting, you had pecans, which was
a big operation. But what happened was that people would come down from the city to pick
the pecans. The people on the plantation would maintain the plantation. So, you had maybe
fifteen, twenty people living on the plantation, working to maintain the plantation.
But this was a community of black people, a big community. On Saturdays, the boys and
girls would meet on the bridge going back, the store was open, they going back and forth,
Saturday evening because you worked until about three o’clock on Saturday. Then you
get off you know, and then you have maybe 25 cents in your pocket and you would go,
a lot of girls on that side of the bridge, and boys, same thing over here, and you would
go back and forth, back and forth and you would meet. The store was like the mall. You
would go and you would get something, and you would walk, and you would stand on the
bridge and you’d holler at girls from over there coming back and forth. So, that was
like we were at the mall. And that was interesting times.
If you were lucky enough to marry one of the girls from the other side, but on this side,
you were almost basically stuck here. So, most of the parents would say, “you can’t
date that girl, she’s your cousin.” And 70 % of the time it was true, but they said
it to make sure their daughter didn’t get stuck on the plantation with a stupid plantation
boy. “Uh, you can’t date, no you can’t come and date my girl, she’s your cousin,”
you know. Tell me how, “I said so,” now that’s it.
But for the most part, these were all families. My mother said to me, “If you both call
the same people uncle and auntie, you can’t marry her. I don’t care if she’s your
twenty second cousin.” I’m going, gee I’m never going to get a wife around here.
*Lauhing* So, it protected a lot of the girls because they wanted their girls to go in the
school and to meet other people. And the boys on the plantation were like, ‘what’s going
to happen to us,” you know. “Who cares “You’re on your own here but you’re
not marrying my daughter and taking her down.” And the ones who wound up marrying the girls
on the plantation, and that’s basically what happened. They moved into a place like
this and started that same life over again and that’s what the parents were fighting.
But growing up here was simply, you got up in the morning at sunlight, you had breakfast
and you went to the fields. And at noon, you come out of the fields, you come home, you
had your lunch, then you went back to the fields. At dusk or dark, you came out of the
field and you made dinner, you sit on the porch, you had conversation and then you went
to bed ‘cause you gotta get up early in the morning and you do this thing over and
over again. As far as going to school, the kids on the
plantation didn’t get to the school until after the crops were in, which was around
the first week of December. So, the kids who were on the plantation, and that was 80 % of
the kids who went to the black high school, which was down at Melrose, St. Matthew, they
would show up in September to register for school in order for the school board to be
able to get the funds to keep the school going, but the kids, in reality, didn’t show up,
back up, until the crops were in. So, you had about 20 % of the kids there,
the kids that were too little to go into fields. Kids that didn’t live on the plantation,
they were in the schools and a lot of girls, the parents would send the girls to school
but the boys they had to work. But for the most part even with the girls, it was you
know it was a couple days here, a could days there until the crops were in.
We were called plantation kids. We showed up with the brogan shoes, we showed up with
the flour sack dresses, we showed up with the overalls, and maybe if we were lucky,
we got khaki pants out of the crops and we would show up, we would be spotted, I mean
it was like, we were different looking people. But what really happened once these kids get
to school, because they had it beat in their brains from their parents, was that “Once
you get to school, you better learn, or you’ll be doing this forever.” Well we knew, we
didn’t want to do this forever, so we were there, we paid attention, we were some of
the best students there and of course, the teachers would also keep in touch from the
time we registered in September to December, they would keep in touch, they would come
by, talk to the parents, talk to the students. Sometimes they would even teach classes to
those kids, they would get them together in one cabin or another and try to teach them.
They tried to keep them up because you’ve got to keep them in school because if you
didn’t the school would lose funding based on student population. So, you had to keep
communicating with them and encourage them. Now when the crops in, you coming back. Usually
when the boys got 16, 17 years old, if they didn’t wind up marrying and starting a family
in the middle of the plantation or leaving, they would stay in school. But I would say
70 % of the boys left school before the tenth grade.
But the girls, if they didn’t get married, they stayed in school, graduated and they
went on, but I graduated in 1967. I would say from the time I started school in the
first grade until the graduation in ’67, we lost 60 % of the boys and maybe 10 % of
the girls from that class. You take the first-grade class and the senior class, and we lost a
lot of them, because it was like, okay what are you going to do? We can’t afford to
send you to school so once you get old enough, you got to work full time on the plantation.
My group was the last group to actually live on the plantation until we graduated. After
that it was total mechanization. Nobody needed you on the plantation. You were forced off
the plantation and you went to Natchitoches or you went to wherever you went to make a
living. There was no way to make a living on the plantation. But of course, you know,
you were gathering pecans, and you were coming down here to do the hay, haul the hay and
stuff. But usually that was done by the few people that was left on the plantation to
maintain the plantation. Now some of the plantation sharecroppers had
big families and they were dedicated to being a farmer, sharecropper or whatever. They had
enough children, a lot of the families joined in together and they had enough to buy a couple
of mules, to buy a couple of wagons and to buy some plows. So, they got more of the share
of the crop and they was able to be like contractors. They were also able to buy land and become
independent contractors. They were not only working their land, they were working parts
of other plantation owners land. It was like, I’ll take twenty-five acres over here, I’ll
take another twenty over here, plus we are going to do ours.
Most of these people were, what you would call Creoles. They had land. Their ancestors
were former plantation owners, so when their fathers and mothers died, they were willed
property. But the black, they got no property and if you were able to buy some property,
it was such a small amount that you weren’t going to make much out of it anyway. They
were what you would call a dirt farmer. You know, but you still had to go to the plantation
to find work to basically augment what you were making and as soon as the crop prices
fell apart, you lost the little land you owned. That was in 1965, ‘66, ‘67, people think
well…no that wasn’t that long ago, and I still see a lot of my classmates and the
ones who stayed and most of them are dead. Most of the ones who remained on the plantation
with their families, you know they were lucky. We called them the lucky ones. Their daddy
knew how to drive that tractor or work on that tractor, so they get to stay. I don’t
know if that was a blessing or not because they stayed, and they took up the trade after
their fathers got too old and they were still working on the plantation. But they worked
very hard and most of them, I would say 85 % of my classmates, men, are dead.
I’m 71 and ¾ but they all died in their late 50’s, early 60’s, because that’s
very backbreaking work. That’s hard work but it’s life on the plantation in a nutshell,
on any plantation, that was the life. I left Natchitoches in July 1967 and about five years
after I left, it was still kind of going on. But by ’70, ’71, it was all ended. There
was no need for people coming down here because the plantation was totally mechanized, totally
and some of the big plantation owners were just leasing it to somebody else as if they’re
doing now. All the plantations, all the cotton and corn you see now, somebody owns it who
manages it from somewhere else and the real landowner just leases it out to them. *Outro
Music*