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Mrs. Sam E. Whelchel
(Georgia)
Tom's note:
This life history covers the same subject as
The Family of an Automobile Worker.
It appears that the interview was conducted by more than one writer, but
the attitude and tone of the articles toward the interviewee are very
similarly disdainful.
Mrs. Whelchel might be described as
"good stable peasant stock". "Reliable" would express her in a word. She
is tall, large-boned, and has a definite tendency toward "heftiness".
Though her uncorrected figure is well under control at present, one can
see her firmly-bulging calves are but a prelude to ultimate general
massiveness.
We found her seated in a rocker on the front porch, comb in hand,
finger-waving the hair of her little girl. On the banister beside her was
a glass of water into which she occasionally dipped the comb. With every
movement of her body the chair teeter-tottered over the warped floor
boards.
The house itself was a weather-beaten frame bungalow painted green and
trimmed in white. It looked none too substantial and the
disproportionately large gable that formed the roof of the porch seemed to
put a threatening strain upon the slender two-by-four posts that supported
it.
Mrs. Whelchel pretended to a great show of self-disparagement when we
explained our visit. "Lord, what's there to write about me?" But at the
same time she obviously was pleased that we had chosen her and was just a
bit fearful that we might take her mild deprecations too seriously. "Well,
what do you want to know?" We suggested that she tell us about her family.
"Well, my husband works over there at the Chevrolet plant." We had seen
Sam Whelchel down at the union office. He was a great hulking figure of a
man, full of laughter, and much like a big overgrown boy despite the
premature grayness of his hair. "He unloads the supplies at the docks and
before that he was a buffer. A buffer holds the fenders up against a wheel
covered with some soft fuzzy stuff and polishes off the scratches. No,
they don't do that anymore. I don't know why; maybe they jest don't care
about the scratches.
"Sam's workin' five days a week now. He gets eighty cents an hour and
works forty hours a week. But it's seasonal work, y'know. They're going
full blast now because the new model's out, but he was off for three
months this summer and jest went back in September. Yes, you sure do get
behind when there's a layoff. I don't care how long he's been working, if
he's laid off for just two weeks it ruins you. Oh, it's bad.
But we're gettin' by. We got two boarders, a couple of men who work over
at the plant. We used to rent out that other side of the house; you see
there's a separate door. But we jest got these two men now. Yeah, it helps
a lot. We tried to make some money on chickens but we jest about broke
even - maybe a little more, I don't know. We had about fifty, but we
haven't got none now. Sold 'em and ate 'em. We lost twenty, but the eggs
from the others made up for it.
"We got a cow too. And a calf. Oh, sometimes I sell some milk, but we
nearly use it all. There's a lady up the street that sends down for some
and if I got it I'll let her have it, but if I haven't I don't. Sam says
he wants to get rid of the cow, but I tell him it don't cost as much to
feed her as it would to buy all the milk we need. Why I'd have to buy four
quarts of milk a day and that'd be more'n she costs us. I tell Sam two
quarts of milk would pay for her feed. We're gonna kill the calf, though,
in a couple of weeks so's we'll have some meat.
"We've got three children. This is Tommy-Ann; she's the youngest, two
years old. That's Bobby in the yard; he's four."
The children had fairly nice features. They were dressed in ordinary play
clothes that were undeniably soiled, but no more so than could be
expected. Bobby's haircut was of the soup-bowl fashion a thick growth
abruptly ending at close-shaven temples and rounded across the back of the
head. His left arm was heavily swathed in gauze and supported in a sling.
His mother's voice was full of compassion as she explained, "He broke it
last week. He was goin' down the back steps and fell all the way. It jest
dangled, poor little thing."
"Phillips six; he's the oldest. He jest took the lunches down to his pa
and the boarders. Yes, I send 'em down to the union office and they come
over from the plant and eat 'em there. It's easier on me that way than if
I was to put up their lunches in the mornin'. I don't have to get up so
early. If I had to fix 'em in the morning I'd have to get up at five
o'clock.
"No, we wasn't born in Atlanta. My home's in Banks County and Sam was
raised in Jackson County. Oh, I don't know when Sam first come to Atlanta.
It was years ago. And then he went through all the states round Georgia
working on one job or another. But I met him here and we were married
here. I told him he went all around in a circle and come right back here
to find me. No, he didn't have much education. He went to high school all
right. I don't know jest how far he went, but he didn't go through it. He
jest taught himself his jobs.
Right after I met him he go on as a lineman for the telephone company.
Before that he was - what do you call it? - you know, fixed furniture up
at the Western Union office here. Yeah, that's it, a refinisher.
"Yeah, I finished high school. I went to Piedmont High School up at
Demorest, Georgia. Now don't put that Piedmont College; I wisht it was. I
finished in two years - I had had one year before that - and I got five
more points than I needed to graduate. The children? Well, I jest hope we
can send 'em through high school. 'Course if any of 'em shows any special
talent, we'll try to give 'em some kind of training. Maybe a business
school or somethin'."
A visit from the insurance collector turned the conversation in that
direction. "Yes, we got two policies on the children - two on each of 'em
I mean. We're trying to catch up now. We hadn't been paying none since
December. Sam comes under the group insurance at the plant.
Yes, there's a doctor there too, and they've got a nurse that comes
around. She's nice, but I don't bother with her much. Whenever the
children're sick I call a doctor. She came around when they had the
measles, though, and mopped their throats and helped with their medicine.
It was nice too when I came back from the hospital when Tommy-Ann was
born. She made regular visits."
"Yes, we own the house. There's seven rooms. Sam's pa built us a sleepin'
porch. We used to live up by the school, back over there on the hill. The
lady what owned the house told us we could rent it for fifteen dollars a
month for a year, but we hadn't been there six months before she told us
she was gonna raise it to twenty-two-fifty in two weeks. There's somethin'
I want to tell you. I don't know whether you're interested or not, but - -
- we used to have a car but we ain't got it now. When that woman raised
the rent we jest didn't like it. It wasn't so much the money - - 'course
that meant somethin' too - but we jest didn't like her doing us that way
after a-tellin' us we could have it for a year. Well, we'd been wantin' to
buy a house so I jest talked to Sam about it and he figured it was time to
do it too. But I said there was one thing sure - we couldn't buy a house
and have a car too. You jest can't buy gasoline and have a house too. Sam
thought about that and then he said, 'Well, I can't live in a car, so I'll
let the car go and get me a house we can sleep in.' So we went down to see
the real estate man and got a list of places they had for sale. And do you
know, this is the first place we come to and I like it. 'Course we looked
at some others, but I liked this one. The yard was nothin' but red gullies
then, but it was near the plant, so we got a FHA loan and started the
payments. In a little while now we'll jest be paying nine-fifty a month on
it. Sam fixed up the yard. There used to be steps here in the middle of
the porch, but he tore 'em down. He dragged those cement steps up from the
walk and put 'em there at the side of the porch. We like it better that
way, it's shorter across the yard."
We asked if we might go through the
house and she agreed quickly, surprisingly enough without any of the
expected apologies for the looks of things.
The living room was small and, although sparsely furnished, seemed
overcrowded. There were three chairs, two of which were rockers dragged in
from the front porch to protect them from the winter weather. There were
also three tables, two of the small half-circle type. On each of these was
a vase of dwarf chrysanthemums crawling with ants. On the lower shelf of
one was a large brilliantly-colored glass pumpkin. The bigger table held a
13-inch world-globe, made in the modern manner with brown oceans and gray
continents. Mrs. Whelchel beamed, "I was hopin' you'd ask me about that.
We got it with a set of books Sam's buying for the children. It's the Book
of Knowledge. Oh, the set costs eighty dollars and we'll have to pay four
dollars a month forever. We couldn't afford it but Sam had been wantin' to
get 'em some sort o' books and the man jest came at the right time, so Sam
said he'd go ahead and do it. We could have got a shelf for the books
instead of a globe, but we decided on a globe."
The floor was covered with a cheap linoleum square patterned in flowers
predominantly red. Several tin cans and a battered coal-bucket holding
planted geraniums, ferns, and coleas were ranged along the baseboards,
obviously brought in to protect them from impending frosts. The remainder
of the floor was littered with children's toys, papers, and cardboard
boxes.
The walls were in a sad state, being of bare plaster poorly applied and
badly cracked. "We painted the walls when we first moved in. They don't
look it now, but we did." They were, however, clean in comparison with the
dirty bedraggled net curtains which sagged unevenly at the windows. In two
corners of the room hung what-not shelves holding porcelain cats and dogs
and a "Donald Duck", a pine cone turkey, and other knick-knacks from the
five-and-ten stores.
But the chief architectural feature of the room, which held and appalled
the eye, was a large double-decked mantelpiece, backed with a broken
mirror. It's shelves were littered with various objects; a picture of the
two older children, a tumbler from which dangled several strands of
wandering-jew, a red statuette of a dog, an empty aquarium, and, on the
upper shelf well out of reach, a Bible. Leaning against the mirror was a
picture of several butterflies hovering above a clump of reeds. Highly
colored, they reflected light in a manner which, though gaudily real, was
nevertheless peculiarly metallic. We had noticed the same quality in a
smaller picture of a ship which hung on the wall.
"I did 'em," said Mrs. Whelchel, smiling broadly and quite pleased with
herself. "We been studying how to make them at our Home Arts Class.
No, it don't cost nothin' except for the materials. It's a WPA class and
we meet up at the school. Our Women's Auxiliary of the Auto Worker's Union
has a Home Arts Committee and I'm chairman of it. We used to have the
class down at the union hall, but that room's so dark and you can't heat
it well and it seems like the men want it all the time, so's we asked the
Parent-Teacher Association if we could meet at the school and they said
yes. We have classes twice a week from ten to one in the mornings. I
haven't missed but one and I sure hated that, but there's so much to do,
what with the children and the housekeeping and the Auxiliary. And tonight
I've got to go to a quiltin' party. Monday night we're giving a supper
here to demonstrate a set of aluminum-ware that Sam and I are trying to
sell some of. We have to have eight couples, the company won't let us do
it for less.
We went into what might be called a dining-room, but the incongruous
furnishings indicated that it served a number of purposes. There was a
green drop-leaf table toward one side of the room, and, by the window, a
smaller table such as children use for their play-parties. "Sam's pa made
that for the children. The other table isn't big enough for all of us."
Placed in the middle of the room, so that we had to weave our way through,
were an electric washing machine and an electric ironer. In one corner was
a massive electric refrigerator with an old-model portable radio perched
atop it. We remarked on these conveniences. "Yes, I couldn't do without 'em.
There's always so much washing', and that ironer will do Sam's pants jest
perfect. We sure do like that frigidaire. Sam says we'll never go back to
a ice-box, no matter what else we give up." A negro maid was shoving the
furniture around in an effort to scrub the floor. "She lives here. We got
a back room for her." Out of earshot in the bedroom she continued: "I've
been trying to find a white girl to take her place, since we want her to
live right here in the house, but you can't find a good white girl for
that sorta work."
The bedroom was that of the boarders. The twin beds were neatly made and
covered with yellow candlewick spreads. "I make those too, but I didn't
make those. I make all our clothes, even Sam's workshirts." She was
wearing one of her own home-made garments, an olive-green cotton dress
with cherry-red buttons. Although over-done with too many gores and pleats
it was excellently sewn, with fine-stitched seams, cuffs, and hem.
She brought out some more of the pictures she had made. They were
principally flower and bird designs, traced and painted in transparent
colors directly on the glass. "It's called 'Gypsy-glaze' painting," she
explained. "You see, I put this gold or silver paper behind them
and......" Her voice trailed off as she became absorbed in the effect thus
produced. "The silver's better," she decided, "...the gold kills the
green."
Taking advantage of her preoccupation, we made observations of the room.
The one window afforded little light, so that the ever-present wall cracks
did not show up so startlingly. In one corner was a table well hidden
under its load of newspapers, union sheets, and Grier and Swamp-Root
almanacs. Across the room in another corner was a two-doored wardrobe,
flimsily constructed of some light-weight wood and stained a bad mahogany.
Directly under the window was a comparatively modern foot-pedal sewing
machine. "Yes, I sew and do all sorts of things in here in the daytime.
The men don't care; they only want it at night." Their further
indifference to the niceties of good housekeeping was indicated by the
state of the mantelpiece. It was literally piled with trash; soiled
handkerchiefs, wadded sheets of paper, an overturned glass from which
spilled several stubby pencils, two small tin boxes, and a large cardboard
match box so piled with cigar and cigarette butts, charred matchsticks,
and ashes that they overflowed onto the mantel and even down upon the
hearth.
We noticed the nice gas heater in front of the grate and recalled a
similar one we had seen in the living room. "Oh, we find it cheaper than
any other heat. Yes, much cheaper than coal. We've got three of 'em. They
keep the house plenty warm. Of course in real bitter cold weather.....but
then nothin's no good then." We remembered the holes we'd observed in the
dining-room floor, clean-cut right through the linoleum as if for pipes,
but we wondered about their being bored in the middle of the room. Of
course the cold air rushed in through them and they should have at least
been plugged, but at the time the Negro maid was using them as drains for
her scrub-water.
The other front room, which opened through a separate door onto the porch,
was merely a catch-all for odds and ends of furniture, rags, newspapers,
broken toys, and empty picture frames. Placed in a "corner", but actually
well-nigh filling the small room, was an old fashioned iron-framed bed,
its bare mattress lying askew and drooping down to the floor. Piled upon
this was the slats and side-boards from yet another bed. Its head and
foot-pieces, over-bearing paneled affairs of dark-stained oak, were jammed
up against the front door. The springs, originally stacked along side
them, had slid comfortably to the floor, thereby pushing the Books of
Knowledge, still encased in their shipping crate, half under a pile of
discarded clothing. The marks of the avalanching springs were scored
deeply in the plaster, adding their scars to those of the omnipresent
cracks. Mrs. Whelchel was at perfect ease among the confusion. She even
managed a sentimental touch. "That bed," she said, "is the only thing
Sam's got of his mother's. We did have Bobby and Tommy-Ann usin' it out on
the sleeping porch until he broke his arm, but we were afraid they'd bump
each other, so we put it in here and gave him another baby-bed."
She led us back through the house and out onto the sleeping porch. She was
obviously very proud this and was pleased with our praise. It was
well-constructed in an ell-shape. It was all of white pine, unpainted, and
still smelling freshly resinous. But like the rest of the rooms, this,
too, was over-crowded and disordered, decorative arrangements being
completely sacrificed for lazy convenience. In the main part of the room
were two baby-beds and a large one. A third baby-bed stood in the "ell"
extension, and beyond this, its white enamel surface gleaming in the sun,
was a huge automatic water-heater.
"And here's the bathroom," Mrs. Whelchel was saying, leading us into a
narrow partitioned cubby-hole which housed the commode and a cemented
shower. "When we bought the place it didn't have no bath and the toilet
was just a lean-to built on the back of the house. One of the first things
Sam did was to install the toilet and then we fixed up the shower. We
don't like a bathtub."
On our way back to the living room we passed through the kitchen. In a
word, it was messy. Here plaster had completely given up the struggle and
had fallen off in great slabs exposing the naked lathes. A few small hairy
chunks still clung desperately and threatened any minute to fall into the
sink which was already piled with dirty pans and dishes and scraps of
water-soaked bread. On the table were sticky knives and spoons where three
children had but recently helped themselves to peanut-butter and jelly. In
strange contrast to the otherwise disreputable furnishings was the new
white "modernistic" gas stove. "Oh, nothin's all paid for, but we pay a
little each week and if Sam don't get laid off it'll be ours some day."
This brought us back to the subject of her husband's job and, seated again
in the front room, Mrs. Whelchel went on talking, her fingers busily
crocheting a coaster. "Things was bad over at the plant before they got
the union started. Sam's been with 'em for six years next February and he
knows. Oh, they weren't as bad as some places I've heard about, but until
they got the union the men had to do pretty much what they told 'em. You
know the strike was in 1935. Yes, it was excitin' all right. Sam slep' in
the plant six nights. He slep' in the tire racks. You know they're two
decks and ever time the man up above turned over Sam says all the dirt and
stuff would fall in his face and eyes. Yes, we had the Women's Auxiliary
then and we run a kitchen down at the office - the union office. We packed
baskets of groceries for the families that didn't have anything to eat and
we made clothes for the children. Dues? Well, I only pay a quarter a month
for the Auxiliary and sometimes I don't think its worth that, but Sam has
to pay a dollar-and-a-quarter to the men's union. He said something about
the quarter being a assessment for the charity work or somethin'. Oh, yes,
I think the union's all right; it's good. They couldn't do without it now.
'Course they have all their squabbles 'n everything, and they fight among
theyselves, but Sam says it's a real pertection."
"Well, if you must, but come back to see us again. Come out Monday night
for the supper if you can. Sam and I'll be glad to have you. Don't know as
I've really told you anything, but you're welcome to it. Goodbye. Yes,
goodbye, goodbye."
LIFE HISTORY
Subject:
Mrs. Sam E. Whelchel,
1391 Miller Reed Ave., SE,
Atlanta, Georgia
Text from: Library of
Congress, Manuscript Division, WPA Federal Writers' Project Collection
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