Cabarrus County, NC - The Fletcher's Interview

The Fletcher's 
Interview by the Federal Writer's Project
 
Federal Writer's Project (later WPA) 
 
Cabarrus Mill Concord, NC 
September 3, 1938 
 
The Flecthers live near the foot of the hill on Young Street. Ruby 
Fletcher's mother says that her aunt lived on this same street nearly 
thirty-five-years ago. "Hit's an old street, been here about forty 
years, and it sure looks like they would have done something to make it 
look better in all that time."

She looks up the hill at the glaring white sand road that humps up in 
the middle, at the ragged banks, at the little square frame houses that 
straggle along the road. When the houses were built apparently each was 
made to fit the lay of the particular spot of land on which it stood; 
consequently, some are below the street level in front and on high 
piles behind (like the Fletchers); others stand on impregnable looking 
banks, or are built on slender brick piles and are reached by a long 
flight of wooden steps in front. Mrs. Pressley's a little girl (with 
the Shirley Temple permanent and the fat, round face) said the Postman 
was always telling her "come here, sister, and get this mail. I don't 
believe I can make it up all them steps." Some of the houses have been 
painted fairly recently, others grow dingy.

There are no trees along the street to soften the glare of the 
sunlight. A few yards have small, ornamental shrub-like growths, but 
the only large trees in any yard are Carolina Poplars -- already 
practically bare. At the top of the hill some of the houses have bare 
dirt yards, but further down most lawns are grassy and have flowers 
somewhere around. Mrs. Pressley's sloping front lawn, which lies far 
below her porch, is a mess of zinnies, marigolds, golden glows, and 
other summer flowers; her porch is shaded with thick vines, and a 
variety of potted plants line the bannisters.

At the crest of the hill, close to the houses, is a little white frame 
church -- the Young Street Baptist. Across from it is a small store 
somewhat on the order of a pop stand.

The hot sun of the September morning beat down on a quiet, almost 
deserted Young Street. A baby with a red parasol and a little girl with 
a tea cup in her hand were the only humans in sight; they were on the 
porch of the dingy little house near the foot of the hill. When I asked 
if their mama were home and if she were busy, the little girl said 
hastily "I don't live here, but she does," pointing to the baby. "I'll 
go tell Miss Fletcher you're here, though," and she darted into the 
house leaving me with the baby who was bright-eyed an attractive in 
spite of its pitiful rachitic legs and an eruption of some kind. "Miss 
Fletcher will be here in just a minute," and the little girl stooped to 
brush off some black particles that clung to the baby's mouth. "It's 
some of that tea I was borrowing from Miss Fletcher -- guess I spilled 
some; I'll declare Alice Jane will eat anything she can get her hands 
on."

A pleasant looking young woman, with a child behind her, appeared in 
the doorway. "How-do," she said shyly and fingered the neck of her blue 
dress. "I'm awful sorry I'm so busy now," she answered to my request to 
talk with her, "but my husband comes home for his dinner at eleven 
o'clock, and I'm just bound to have it ready. You could go over and 
talk with Miss Pressley, she sends her husband's dinner -- and she can 
talk better then I can. Or if you could come back some other time when 
I'm not so busy."

She stood cautiously behind the screen door all the time she was 
talking, perhaps she did not want me to see that she was barefooted. As 
I left she told me her name was Ruby Fletcher.

After 3:30 in the afternoon Young Street bursts with life. The front 
porches are full of men in overalls, girls in gay summer dresses, and 
housewives -- most of them still barefooted and wearing their work 
dresses. Radios are going, cars back out of driveways, a man is 
polishing a gas stove in his back yard, two girls in orange slacks and 
white shirts walk down the road.

The Fletcher's small porch seemed full when I came up in the afternoon. 
Ruby greeted me in her sweet, quiet manner and asked me to have a 
chair, but she did not get up nor did she introduce me to the older 
woman and the chubby teen-age girl who were sitting with her. I learned 
that the women was her mother, Alice Candle, and the girl was a 
neighbor. For a while Alice Candle did most of the talking. She kept up 
a lively flow of conversation; Ruby occasionally made a brief remark; 
the neighbor girl put down the blue silk dress on which she had been 
sewing, and stared at me; Ruby's two children, Darlene and Alice Jane, 
devoted themselves to the whole package of chewing gum I gave them.

"Don't I look pretty?" Ruby asked, looking down at the blue cotton 
dress she had worn in the morning, and at her bare feet. "I don't know 
why I put on this old rag this morning, less it was because I was in 
such a hurry. And these young'uns are a sight," she said as she 
gathered them into the house with her. She seemed to feel much more at 
ease when she reappeared leading Darlene and Alice Jane, immaculate in 
clean home-made sun suits.

As Ruby Fletcher put it, she has her hands full, what with caring for 
the house, helping in the garden, cooking, sewing, and watching after 
the children. Since she was three years old she had lived in Concord, 
and she went to high as the seventh grade in the Long School, which to 
the grammer school most of the mill children attend. She said she guess 
she would have gone to High School except that when the time came to go 
she was sick so she just never did start. Instead she kept house for 
her mother who worked in the mill; her father was dead. Then, when she 
was seventeen, Ruby married Carl Fletcher. Carl had worked in the mill 
and saved money so he could go to high school for two years. "He surely 
worked hard for those two years, but he might just as well have kept 
his money," according to Ruby, "because he got married after that and 
couldn't finish. What good did it ever do him?" During her twenty-three 
years Ruby has never worked in the mill a day, but she admits she would 
like to have a job there because she's tired of doing nothing but keep 
house.

Carl is about the same age as Ruby. He is tall and thin, with a 
sensitive face and intelligent dark eyes. His work is tying knots for 
the weaving machine (Ruby's explanation at a wage of 58¢ an hour (less 
the recent 10¢ cut). When he gets out of the mill in the afternoon, 
Carl enjoys playing with the children, working around the house or in 
the garden. The first afternoon I met him, he was scraping the paint 
off an old oak sideboard of the mirror-and-double-decker era. By 
removing the top part and mirror, he made what had been a rather 
hideous piece of furniture into a simpler and better-looking buffet for 
the combination dining room-kitchen. He made a very ingenuous scraping 
device by bending an iron file. "Sandpaper never would have taken off 
all the coats of paint on that sideboard," he explained.

This summer Carl went to the army training camp in Mississippi for two 
weeks. "But it seemed like two months to me," Ruby told me when we had 
become well acquainted. "I was so lonesome, I thought I'd die. When he 
come home he bought Darlene a blue parasol and Alice Jane a red one, 
just like the ones I had got for them the Saturday before at the dime 
store. It sure was funny."

For amusement the Fletchers have the movies (but they don't go often), 
the mill baseball grounds where they can watch the boys play hard ball 
and the girls play soft ball, and the town baseball games. They don't 
have a car of their own, but they can sometimes borrow Carl's father's 
or maybe his brother's car. A week ago they went to the mountains. The 
family goes to the Young Street Baptist Church, which stands on the 
hill, and Carl sings in the choir. Some Friday nights Darlene goes to 
choir practice with him.

Ruby likes the little four room house for which they pay 1.64 every two 
weeks. "It's beaver-boarded all over inside and the neighbors are just 
as nice as they can be; it's handy being so close to my father-in-law 
too. The only trouble is there's no place for the children to play; the 
garden's in the back yard and the street's so close to the house in 
front I'm afraid to let Alice Jane alone there for a minute. This front 
porch is so hot of a morning, you just can't set on it, but it's real 
nice in the afternoon since that vine at the end grew up."

The little lawn around the house is well kept, and inside every room is 
extremely neat and clean. The front bedroom is furnished with a suite 
made of golden-brown wood, decorated with scroll work at the top; the 
living room has a suite of wicker furniture and the only wall 
decoration is a large tinted portrait, probably of some member of the 
family; the back bedroom has an iron bed, an oak bureau, a linoleum 
rug; the kitchen, also used as dining room, has a large oilcloth 
covered table, an oil stove, a sink with a piece of oilcloth behind it 
to protect the wall, a kitchen cabinet and the recently renovated 
sideboard; the floor is covered with linoleum. Outside the kitchen door 
stands a large, gleaming white electric refrigerator. The four rooms 
open from a hall that runs through the center of the house. At the end 
of this hall is a small, screened back porch and from this porch the 
bathroom is reached. It does not connect directly with the house.
Despite the cleanliness of the house, the air in it seems stuffy, 
probably because the windows are so few. This would account too for the 
dimness of the rooms.

About five o'clock in the afternoon a number of men, women, and 
children began straggling by the Fletcher house walking down toward the 
meadows at the very end of the street. I noticed many of them carried 
buckets and cans; one little boy pushed his younger brother and a large 
bucket together in a wheelbarrow. I was curious as to where they were 
going.

"They're a-going to slop their hogs that they keep down in the bottom 
land," Alice Candle said. "Ruby and Carl have a fine bog down there, 
had another one but hit died of the lock-jaw."

Carl usually feeds the hogs but since I wanted to see it, Ruby said she 
would go with me. While Carl mixed the slop under the spigot in the 
front yard, Ruby went in the house put on multi-colored high heel 
sandals and a clean green cotton dress trimmed with white collar, cuffs 
and pockets. She combed her hair arranging her permanent wave 
becomingly.

As we walked down past the last houses on the street, the road dwindled 
into a little footpath between the tall meadow grasses. Ruby explained 
that the pig went in the bottom land belonged to a colored man, and the 
people rented them from him for $3.00 a year. She pointed out too a 
strip of corn on the slope above the pens. "That's Carl's corn. He 
rents the patch from his brother-in-law."

About a dozen hogs were kept in the pens screened by the high grass. 
Around one pen a cluster of men gathered while one man inside the pen 
examined a hog.

It had hurt its leg, but they didn't think it was broken. Another group 
of men in overalls leaned against a wooden fence and talked; little 
boys pulled their homemade wagons up and down the paths that threaded 
the grass; a woman, surrounded by her children, held the end of a cow 
chain and was gently tugging the cow away from the thick grass toward 
home. The late afternoon sun filled the meadow and gilded the corntops 
on the hillside. At that moment it was not hard to understand why Ruby 
Fletcher felt "the mill is as good a way to make a honest living as 
any."

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