ARKANSAS - The Dunnes - WPA Life History

1001 Broad St. West Durham, N. C. 

July 12, 1938 

I. L. M. 

THE DUNNES 

Sally Dunne is the mother of thirteen children, three of whom are dead
and three married. Seven of the children ranging from two and a half to
eighteen live with their mother and father in an old, four-room,
loosely-built house located a short distance from the houses belonging
to the company which owns the mill where John Dunne works. Some of the
people in the mill village will tell you that the Dunnes were asked to
move off the hill because the near-by neighbors discovered that their
coal was disappearing at night; others will tell you that they did not
take proper care of the company's house. At any rate the Dunnes cannot
rent a company house and they pay $13 a month for the dilapidated one
in which they live. It is becoming increasingly difficult for them to
find a house of any kind because there have been months when the rent
was not paid. John Dunne makes fourteen dollars a week and on that the
family of nine must live. 

As you come to the intersection of Broad and C Sts. you will more than
likely see Sally's smaller children playing in the little patch of
front yard and when you ask them where she is they will answer readily,


"Mama, is settin' out on the back porch." One of them runs ahead of you
into the house and you walk uneasily through the confusion which is
their home. The first two rooms are crowded with dirty beds and a few
shabby chairs. The bedroom on the right contains a dusty table and a
dustier radio. You look at the dirty floor and your mind is brought
back to the fact that the woman who keeps this house is "settin' out on
the back porch." 

You find Sally out there on the small porch surrounded by three of her
children who are helping her tag tobacco sacks. Her unwieldy body
bulges over the sides of her chair and an enormous tumor gives her the
appearance of permanent pregnancy. She tells one of the children to get
up and give you his chair. She waits for you to speak and when you have
made some introductory remark she says "I keep alookin' toward you but
I can't hardly see you. They aint no sight at all in one eye and the
sight in the other is gettin' dimmer fast." 

She speaks of her blindness in a tone of such complete acceptance that
you do not know what to say. You look into the dining room at the
crude, home-made table with its ugly oilcloth and then at the icebox
which is the other piece of furniture in the room. You decide to ask
Sally about her work and soon she is telling you that she and the
children tag 20,000 of the sacks a week and for it they receive $1.53.
"It seems like that money goes further than John's wages," she
continues. Sometimes we use it for clothes and now and again we buy
somethin' foolish which I reckin we ought to get along without. I buy
the "Durham Sun" for the children and it costs 15 a week, but they do
love to read the funnies." 

As Sally goes on to tell you of her early life you decide that even if
her eyes were strong the paper she takes for the children would
interest her very little as reading matter. She had time to go no
further than the third grade, for her public work-life started at ten. 

Sally was born in Arkansas on a 160 acre farm belonging to her
grandfather, Josiah White. As a young man Josiah was a tenant farmer in
Durham County and after he was married he moved to Mississippi, hoping
to find there such conditions as would give him a chance to become in
time a land-owner. Believing, after two years of hard labor, that
possibilities of his becoming a land-owner in that State were remote he
moved with his wife and one child into Arkansas. No other children were
born to him and by the time his daughter, Molly, mother of Sally, was
eighteen he had paid for his 160 acre farm and furnished it with live
stock. Molly married a neighboring tenant who then came to live with
her on her father's place. When he died eight years later he left Molly
with Sally and three younger children. It was not long until Josiah
died and his widow, after selling the farm and stock for $1,300,
returned to North Carolina. 

Near a bag factory in East Durham Molly's mother bought a four-room
house for herself and Molly's family. While the grandmother looked
after the three smaller children Molly went into the mill. She took
Sally, then an energetic child of ten, along and found work for her at
twenty-five cents a day. Molly made around fifty cents daily and on the
combined wages of mother and child the family subsisted. 

Sally had worked a long time before she was sixteen. When she reached
that age she felt that life must indeed be half over. Work without any
sort of recreation always had been her lot and marriage appeared to
offer at least one advantage -- change. Child bearing began immediately
and with it even more responsibility and less time for thoughts of
recreation. It seems foolish to her today that grown people should want
to go to ball games and picture shows. Her dislike of billiard parlors
is pronounced but not nearly so much as her fear of liquor stores. 

Before she has finished with her remarks about liquor stores it is
obvious that John goes to the one just down the street a little too
often. "If John was to get drunk and get himself arrested the company
would fire him," Sally tells you in affirmation of what you are already
thinking. She says that she has not forgotten the two months not more
than six years ago when John was out of work and there was not so much
as a dollar to buy the children food. 

The mill at which John Dunne then worked was closed suddenly but it
took the workmen some time to realize that the shut-down could be
permanent. After two weeks John started on a trek through North and
South Carolina to look for a job. Sally had gotten up early and made
bread from the last dust of flour, and fried the last egg. John looked
at the table and turned away. "I aint hungry" he said. "I'll leave
what's there for the younguns." Sally sat there alone in the kitchen
long after he had gone. She knew John was hungry. She knew, too, that
his mind was miserable with doubt. He didn't know whether there was any
job ahead of him and he didn't know how his family would get food. 

Suddenly Sally stops speaking and a smile lights up her ugly face. With
an abrupt jesture of her right hand she pushes her hair further up
under the bonnet-like cap shading her eyes. Then she says, "We had
neighbors close by who was workin' at another mill but my mind wasn't
on neighbors that morning John left. I just kept settin' there while
the little bit of breakfast got colder and colder. Then all of a sudden
I heard a knockin' on the kitchen door. When I opened the door and seen
about a dozen folks standin' there with their arms full of groceries I
couldn't help but cry. Well, John stayed gone a month and they wasn't a
day we didn't have at least one meal. He come back without a job and it
was a good month before he got one at another mill in Durham. Them was
hard, hard times. I was needin' cover that winter but they wasn't a
chance to save ahead for it." 

You know that any comment you might make would sound trivial. The
silence gets deep and is broken only when a young woman you did not
know lived here comes out of the house leading her two-year old baby.
The child, dressed in a sunsuit, laughs gleefully as her mother puts
him out in the yard to play. The woman sits down on a box in the corner
of the porch and begins to smoke a cigarette. "That's my daughter
Stella," Sally tells you and then adds "Her and her man both is out of
work and they're stayin' with us a while." 

Stella is drawn into the conversation and it is not long before she has
told you of the furniture she tried to buy. When she and Bill were
first married they selected a bedroom suite, a cedar chest, an
upholstered chair, two linoleums, and a big fine oil stove. When she
first saw the bedroom suite marked at $39.50, she thought it must
really be the greatest bargain in town. When, after the sale was made,
the proprietor began adding carrying charges which brought the price up
to $61 she was a little baffled, but he explained to her just how easy
the payments could be made. The bill for the furniture came to $200 and
she and Bill had paid all of it but $80 at the time they lost their
jobs. She doesn't see yet why they couldn't let her keep at least the
bedroom suite. The subject of furniture is soon passed over and Stella
tells you why she lost her job. 

Stella lost her job when new spinning machinery was installed. The
spinners retained were given eight sides instead of seven with a pay
increase of two dollars a week. That sum was the regular wage paid
heretofore for the operation of one of the old frames. The new Long
Draft Machinery has around two hundred spindles and the old spinning
frame contained 112 spindles. Stella has a friend still working who
says she had never dreamed that eight hours of work could be so hard.
Once she was able to catch up with her work and enjoy ten or fifteen-
minute rest periods throughout the day, but since the installation of
the Long Draft Machinery she stays continuously behind as much as
fifteen or twenty minutes. 

Stella's husband lost out when the doffers were asked to sign a paper
stating that they were willing to do more work. Out of the sixteen then
employed eight signed and they immediately began doing the work of all.


Stella and her husband have been living for the past six weeks on the
unemployment insurance which they drew and will continue to draw for
ten more weeks if their unemployment continues. They have spent a
considerable part of it travelling from mill to mill in hope of finding
a job. 

Stella looks out into the yard where her baby is playing with her young
sisters and brothers. "I hope I don't never have another one," she
says. "I had a miscarriage from lifting a heavy tub of water when he
wasn't more than a year old. I went to the doctor and asked him what a
woman could do to keep from havin' babies. I'm tryin' to do what he
told me." 

A child runs through the house and says that he sees his sister, Sue,
coming down the street. He leaves the screen door ajar and Stella
reprimands him for it though there are plenty of holes through which
any fly might find his way inside. 

Sue with her two children arrive and you are told that she is another
of Sally's married daughters. She lives with her husband in the near-by
mill village. Her hair-style, voice, and mannerisms show a marked
resemblance to Betty Boop. You begin to feel that Sally's prejudice
against movies is not shared by her children. 

Sue's two children, dressed in sunsuits, go out into the yard to play
with Stella's baby. The two sisters discuss the amount of milk the
doctor has prescribed for their children and indicate by their
conversation that they try to meet the requirements. In the meantime
you knock at flies. "I declare, I bathe that youngun every night before
I put him to bed," Stella is saying "but he does get awful dirty."
Sally joins in to say that she dreads Wednesday and Saturday nights
because on those two nights all of the smaller children take their
bathe and they make a great commotion dragging the tin tub back and
forth from the porch to the kitchen where the bathing is done. You look
out into the yard at Sally's children and decide that they do appear
cleaner than the house to which they belong. 

Sue mentions her grandmother, Molly, and when you manifest an interest
in her Sally tells you that Molly still lives in the small house which
she inherited when her mother died. With her are her unmarried son and
her divorced daughter, who is the mother of two children. The son is a
loom fixer with a weekly wage of $22.00. He not only supports his
mother but also contributes toward the support of his youngest sister's
family when her wage as part-time worker in a silk mill cannot meet
their needs. Molly's fourth child married a tenant farmer and they have
no children. 

After a while you leave the over-crowded house of the Dunnes and as you
go along you recall other things that Sally has told you. Into your
mind there come certain conclusions as to how she feels toward her own
problems. 

With full awareness that her husband's wage can never cover the needs
and can hardly touch the wants of her family, she is on the alert for
any donations from the outside. She'd like for some of the older
children at home to start working in the mill but since the mill cannot
use them and the outside world does not need them she has been brought
to the attitude that various organizations will have to help her with
her problems. Her children had been attending the Methodist Church for
a number of years but the kindness of the Baptist preacher at Christmas
time last year converted them to the Baptist way of thinking. Sally
says "There wouldner been any Christmas at this house if that man
hadn't took a interest in providin' for my younguns. He brought a big
goods box of things to us and I ain't never been much happier than when
I was unpacking it. They was apples, oranges, candy, nuts, tops, dolls,
trains, and little wagons -- plenty to divide amongst them still
believing in Santa Claus." 

The teacher which she likes best is the one who last winter bought her
twelve-year old son a pair of shoes after he had been absent from
school for three weeks on account of the cold weather. She hopes that
by next year the school will furnish free lunches for the children and
eliminate her problem of providing three meals a day. If you should
manifest any interest in how she manages to provide food for her crowd,
her characteristic answer is, "Every head I've got would go hungry if I
didn't keep peas aboilin' in the pot all the time." 

With continual acceptance of unsolved problems Sally has reached a
state of lethargy which she does not or cannot disturb. There seems to
be no appreciable effort to train her children in the tasks about the
house. After the Dunnes have eaten, some of the children will wash the
dishes in a hasty and slip-shod manner and then join the rest of the
family in one of the two dirty bedrooms where the $12 radio is turned
on at full-blast. Some of the children are good looking and as a group
appear of average intelligence. With no direction of their energies
they play a little, scrap a little, and live from meal to meal while
Sally sits among them, usually holding a tobacco sack which she is
tagging without being able to see it very well. 


Credit: Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, WPA Federal Writers' Project 
Collection.

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