Elvin Shields: After mechanization, we left the plantation.
As we moved into these little subdivisions made for blacks, like Breda Town, Jackson
Square area, Southdown, parts of East Natchitoches, where...
Former plantation owners bought the land and went in there and put the real thousand square
foot houses.
No matter what you had, you had room for a garden.
Now they wouldn't let you bring chickens to town because nobody wanted to hear the darn
rooster crowing all over the darn place, but you always had a garden.
This is my favorite picture here.
That is a ex-sharecropper turned entrepreneur in the city.
He brought the exact same job that he was doing on the plantation.
He would plow up your garden and do your rows for you for about a dollar, and he would also
get jobs at some of the bigger homes in town, plowing up areas to become flower gardens
and stuff like that.
A lot of people in the more affluent areas, had large areas of daylilies and irises.
That's another black entrepreneur who picked up these skills at the plantation.
He was the blacksmith, and he would take care of the shoeing of the horses, repairing the
wagons, fixing plows.
And even when he left the plantation, he brought that to him in town.
Now here's the funny part.
That same guy became a mechanic when cars hit town because he had the skills.
You see how every of those wheels are?
What you got in those sacks, is usually pecans.
And this is a massive operation like Eldridge Johnson, the Anchor Brothers, and basically
they were the wholesalers of pecans.
And this is being hauled from here all the way to Alexandria to be picked up and shipped
off to sell.
But all spring of chopping cotton and all fall of picking cotton, I would make more
money in two months of the pecan season, damn, because you would go out, and you would pick
the pecans for half.
And then you did what you want with your half.
You could sell them at the plantation store, and he'd give you maybe $.25-.20 cents a pound.
Or you can bring it to town to Eldridge Johnson, Anchor Brothers, and you would sell them.
You'd get $.35 cents a pound.
So what we would do is save all our pecans all week.
And on Saturday, if somebody got a old pick-up or a wagon or a new...
You could take them to town and come back and pay off the money.
That's something I have yet to see.
Usually the man is sitting on the wagon, where's he could control all the horses.
Normally the horses are all put together.
You make you a seat out of one of those bales, and you would be sitting there to a guy and
your horses instead of a guy sitting on the horse.
I've never seen that operation before.
That's a crazy operation, but that's what he's got there.
He's taking it out of the gin.
Where's with bale, and you're taking it somewhere to be...
Put it on a boat or a train to be shipped somewhere.
Once it'd come out of the gin, its a commercial operation because you've already got your
money for it.
Now it's being sold somewhere else, and it's on its way on a conveyor to take it to New
Orleans or take it somewhere.
This is a day of year that during sharecropping time, every Saturday we had the ice man come
through plantation.
The ones of us who were lucky enough to have the so-called ice boxes...
What it was, was nothing more than a insulated cabinet painted white.
Where's you would put a block of ice up in the top of it as it melt, it would drip to
the bottom.
And as it continued dripping in the bottom of that, so called refrigerator, it would
be cool.
So you would put the stuff you want to preserve most closer to the ice, and as it drip down
to the bottom, you have vegetables down in that area.
And then when it gets full you want to would empty it out.
You wouldn't throw it out.
You'd just dump it in the cistern.
But anyway, this guy comes around, $.25 cent for a 25 pound block of ice, and it would
be high demand.
You're in the field when he shows up to deliver the ice, and he would come by on the Saturday.
And he would go through the back door into the kitchens, and he would look and see how
much ice you should've got.
You'd have to say, "Oh, she's almost gone.
She won't make it until next Saturday."
You would automatically pull it out of, and you would put you a whole new one in there.
And you would leave the 25 cents on top of the ice bucket.
Now usually echelon people with money, they always had a means to letting me in and put
the ice.
Because before electricity was available in rural areas, everybody had a ice box.
You own your little jip-joint.
You had to get ice.
You own a restaurant.
You had to get ice, and this was a business.
They would go around delivering ice everywhere.
That's your typical going to town to pick up grocery items, and that's like a store
over there across the way.
And it was interesting that these plantation owners who own stores for the plantation...
And after mechanization they went out of business.
You think they would move to town and kept the store going in the community.
So what you would get is an extension of that.
Most of these plantation owners bought up land because they knew the people have to
move, and they got Silvan Friedman, Harry Friedman, his brother.
They started Southdown and all that, where they only built a little store there, and
then a black guy run it for them.
So they followed their customers, and of course he gave them credit.
There were no such thing as a laundry.
Now you have these little laundries and cleaners.
That was no such thing.
That was all done in home by the black women who were working in these homes to take care
of the laundry and all that, and she used to, delivering laundry also.
It is a typical occupation.
It was self sufficiency to handle laundry and to do...
But that was the only things that was available for black people during that time.
And that's a typical delivery boy there, and he worked at the store.
He swept-up the store.
After the day he picked up the trash, and then he made deliveries.
He knew what you wanted, and the kids were delivering grocery items to the more affluent
people.
That was a job.
It paid $.25 cents an hour or so.
That is a typical great grandma situation.
When they get too old or work in the fields, they stayed with the children on the plantation.
These ladies took up skills like midwifing, but she's still working some way.
She's still raising her garden.
She's still taking care of her own cabin.
She's teaching young girls how to deliver babies, and she's helping with the children.
And this is a typical black man in his sixties.
He's been broken down from the hard work of the plantation.
That's what happens.
That's where you go