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4B • THURSDAY, JUNE 19, 2003
Nancy’s Flat
Continued from Page IB
there. Back then everyone knew you and you knew everyone.”
Even though he was small he still remembers the cold and leaky little shotgun house at the Flat that the family called home before they moved for the first time in 1929 or ‘30 to The Point near Logtown. They left behind Lee’s grandmother at the Flat. She lived in a larger, nicer house there, he said. Soon after, he started school at Rosenwald School. He remembers his first teacher as Helen Abram.
Their time at the Point was short though and in 1932 the family moved back to Nancy’s Flat. Lee’s grandmother had moved and the family moved into her house. They lived there under the fruit trees until 1938, Lee said, when one of his daddy’s sisters decided she wanted the house for herself though she didn’t end up living there.
“At that time daddy built us a shack to live in. It was never painted but just closed in against the weather,” Lee said.
While living in his grandmother’s old house Lee remembers that an aunt used to come and can the pears that grew on the trees in the yard. Then she would lock them up in a pantry. After a while she complained to my mother that the pears were disappearing. She said us kids were stealing them.
“That made my mama mad and she took up for us, but you know, we really were stealing them, out of the back of the cupboard that had a cardboard back and taking them into the woods to eat,” Lee said.
The woods were where the kids spent a lot of time playing and he and his , brother had all kinds of things to play with out there, he said. What he remembers most are the flying squirrels that they caught and tamed for pets.
He also remembers the long walk through the woods to school, about three or four miles, when the weather permitted. But after a big rain you couldn’t walk through the woods and had to use the road and it was much further by road, he said.
“So we didn’t go to
school much when the weather was bad,” said Lee. “There were no buses for the black children, but there was one for the white children and I used to wonder why the bus would pass us by, why we couldn’t have a ride to school.”
Lee’s parents never did own an automobile, he said, and never did learn to drive. The girls would usually go to school a little longer than the boys, he said, because the boys would be expected to get a job to help pay the bills and keep up the family.
In 1932, when Lee was eight, he remembers the community being hard hit by the depression. He remembers being hungry a lot and working just to get something to eat, and hopefully, a little something to take home for everyone else.
“Even though we had a garden we missed a lot of meals,” he said. “And I remember having to chew a piece of sugar cane just to get something in my stomach.”
During those years, Lee’s daddy was gone a lot, he said, working in a camp over near where Port Bienville is now, hauling paper wood for a week or weeks at a time.
After the family moved to their shack, Lee thinks in 1939, he remembers several white men coming* to the door and asking his daddy to store some barrels of moon shine in the big house for them.
His daddy said the house belonged to his sister an he would have to ask her permission. They told him to have an answer by the next evening, Lee said. The answer was no and not the one they wanted. They told us that if they couldn’t use the house than not one would.
“Later that night we looked out, about 1 or 2 a.m. and they were setting fire to the house. My daddy told us to go back to bed and he never reported it as far as I know,” Lee said. “But I knew all those men then and I know all of them now, though some may have died. They passed not more than a few feet in front of me when they drove away.”
In 1941 things began to take a turn for the better.
Lee got work in the paper wood industry, loading logs by hand onto barges in the Pearl River at Logtown. He remembers H.D. Dean and Howze stores and The Fountain’s pharmacy and that Sam Whitfield had an office in the pharmacy. He also remembers the time that a truck full of logs backed right off the barge into the river.
In 1942 one of Lee’s brothers went into the service and began to send money home and the family was able to build a better house, using the money and the lumber that Lee’s daddy was able to bring home from his job at a saw mill. The house still didn’t have any electricity or running water, he said. In 1944 the family had another setback when an aunt in charge of the property sold it to the Thigpens. They had to move the house, board by board to The Point.
By the time the house was finished it was about 1947. Lee’s brother John had recently- married Lillian Rodgers. The 1947 hurricane hit that year too. Everyone came to the Lee house because it was new and strong. The storm was different, he said, because it was during the day and you could see the trees blowing and bending.
Shortly after, Lee started to move around to find work and ended up in New Orleans, not returning to the area until around 1960 when he and his bride Eddie settled once again in Logtown.
They had known each other all their lives, but Eddie’s father did not approve of Lee.
“I was known as guite the lady’s man,” said Lee. “But we didn’t want to marry anyone else but each other,”
So the two ran off to Gulfport to be married and kept the marriage secret for about 9 months, Lee said. The marriage produced seven children. And after a while the family accepted him.
In early 1964, at the last possible moment, the Lees moved their almost new little house to Pearlington. To leave their birth place and relocate their lives the government had paid them $3,500.