Viewing page 2 of 6

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

Transcription: [00:04:19]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
So you were close to your grandmother?
[00:04:21]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
Huh?

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
You were close to your grandmother?
[00:04:23]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
Oh yeah, I was 22 years old when she passed. [[Laughs]]

{SPEAKER name="Louise Spence"}
Oh, that's nice.
[00:04:29]

{SPEAKER name="Louise Spence"}
What did your grandmother do for a living?
[00:04:34]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
She did laundry work.
[00:04:38]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
She was a cook at one of the biggest boardin' houses, mid-cook
[00:04:42]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
at one of the biggest boardin' houses
[00:04:45]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
and while my mother was growing, her brother, older than her, was growing up.
[00:04:51]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
She was, a cook at this place. She babysat at night for the Clary family,
[00:04:59]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
and just did what she could and kept her children together because her husband asked her.
[00:05:09]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
She told not to ever let his children go into any of his family's homes to live.
[00:05:21]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
Don't let them take over. Now, what his reason for it I'll [[Laughs]] never know
[00:05:27]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
cause I don't guess he ever told her.
[00:05:30]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
But she fought the battle and they all four lived to be grown.
[00:05:36]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
Before their son, the only son, was killed by getting mixed up with the wrong class of women.
[00:05:48]

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
So tell us a little bit about Memphis during this period that you're --
[00:05:58]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
Of my life?

{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
Growing up. Yeah.
[00:06:01]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
I was born in the First Ward, as I told you,
[00:06:04]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
the year that Memphis Health Department started registering births.
[00:06:14]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
I'm registered in volume 1.
[00:06:19]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
They don't have the date, but they have the month,
[00:06:23]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
and Mrs. Annie Washington was the midwife for all that section, white and black.
[00:06:30]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
Everybody was named Grandma Washington to her.
[00:06:36] 

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
I was born next door to a Jewish family on the north side of 81st and Front Street,
[00:06:46]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
and a black family on the south, I mean on the east side
[00:06:52]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
because I was born at 346 North Front Street so
[00:06:56]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
that's what the copy of my birth certificate shows.
[00:07:04]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
I lived all of my life until I was near thirty.
[00:07:13]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
Went from Main Street East Jackson in the front. Then, we moved in the rear of Concord,
[00:07:27]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
which now is Parkway now but,
[00:07:30]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
it was the Concord area,

[00:07:32]
{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
and I became a member of the church at 2nd and Looney.

[00:07:38]
{SPEAKER name="Pearl Bowser"}
How old were you then?

[00:07:40]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
Thirteen. I was thirteen on the 25th of April, and I was baptized on the first Sunday of May
[00:07:51]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
of that same year and joined Pilgrim's Rest, at that time, Baptist Church.
[00:08:00]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
And my grandmother had joined there when she came here from,
[00:08:07]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
was brought here, from Georgia. Took up with her family. [[Chuckles]]
[00:08:15]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
I was thinking back on how
[00:08:20]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
she said that the people that visited Macon, Georgia described
[00:08:28]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
coming to Tennessee as everybody up here.
[00:08:34]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
Then they sold what they had down there which was-- I don't know how they came back-- but they sold it and
[00:08:42]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
came to Tennessee, thinking that cotton would grow so tall that you had to,
[00:08:47]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
you know, stand up and pick at it. [[Laughter]]
[00:08:51]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
Oh, it was the funniest thing ever she would tell me. I said, "Momma, did they really believe that?"
[00:08:57]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
She said, "Yeah!" She said yes.
[00:09:02]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
and I guess it must've been what the history books called the carpetbaggers went through there telling them, you know. All of that stuff.
[00:09:12]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
They hadn't been used to being around nobody 'cause, now, she often told me that
[00:09:20]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
there were times when the war was going on. See, she was just 9 years old when the Civil War ended.
[00:09:29]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
But she said that the lady of the house would take her to the fort at Atlanta, and she'd thread needles for them sewing,
[00:09:40]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
for the Confederate soldiers.
[00:09:44]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
And she always was afraid of going.
[00:09:47]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
She didn't want nobody to have her going that she knew about in the house.
[00:09:52]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
'Course, after I got grown, the children people would, you know, they would, they would hid it from Momma.
[00:09:59]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
My [[laughs]] Momma couldn't have any guns around, but she said that a slave would tell her, "Caroline,
[00:10:07]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
we are not going to let anybody bother you.
[00:10:12]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
You don't have to be worried about what's going on in there, it's safe to say".
[00:10:18]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
Somebody, her family, she had uncles that
[00:10:24]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
their owner hired out to folks for, to do carpentry work. He collected the money see but they did the work.
[00:10:34]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
But, now nobody, wasn't supposed to bother him being the bounty hunters wasn't hunting for them as runaway slaves or nothing.
[00:10:44]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
There has always been, divisions and sections and things. A lot of things that history books don't give them account.
[00:10:53]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
It went on.
[00:10:58]

{SPEAKER name="Louise Spence"}
What, you wanna be more detailed about that?
[00:11:03]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
Huh?
[00:11:03]

{SPEAKER name="Louise Spence"}
What the history book didn't tell that division.
[00:11:06]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
Yeah! Cause some of 'em, they, I have heard people, they have told me.
[00:11:11]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
I mean black people have told me, that they weren't allowed to sing or to pray
[00:11:18]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
or nothing like that. Well now, we were carried to the church,
[00:11:24]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
but we sat in a different section from the owners of it.
[00:11:27]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
My father was, he's my grandfather, [[laughs]] not my father.
[00:11:39]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
My grandfather, he turned out be a Methodist preacher 'cause that was the Methodist
[00:11:50]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
system. That he could read the bible the way he was taught to read it.
[00:11:55]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
by the people that owned.
[00:11:57]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
But I've heard other colored people say that they didn't allow them to sing.
[00:12:03]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
They had to turn the part down and
[00:12:05]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
oh, let well, now, there have been sections of everybody just like there are right now. All white people weren't mean and nasty.
[00:12:18]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
They just had to live with the customs of the time just like you having to do right now.
[00:12:24]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
There are some colored people that have sense enough to know
[00:12:30]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
That color of skin doesn't make a difference in the heart of a person.
[00:12:35]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
'Cause I had somethin happen to me
[00:12:38]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
not too long ago by own of my own.
[00:12:43]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
that really upset me.
[00:12:46]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
You see, when his family, this person's ancestor
[00:12:55]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
came here to Memphis from Alabama where he was born.
[00:13:02]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
He opened, he started selling fuel, coal, and wood.
[00:13:07]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
My mother was small, and he would go by when my grandmother would be at [[Wickertis Lord's?]] Boardin' house.
[00:13:17]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
and see that they had fuel and leave it, and at the end of the week she would pay him.
[00:13:27]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
All right. In later years, he and another man opened up an undertaker shop,
[00:13:33]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
and my grandmother told me, said now
[00:13:37]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
as long as, we all gonna die some day,
[00:13:41]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
as long as they in business and treat you- treat y'all all right
[00:13:47]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
I would rather that you use him when that time came
[00:13:53]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
for an undertaker which was
[00:13:56]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
a decent thing to do.
[00:13:59]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
All right, that man, that particular man
[00:14:04]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
had 6 sons, didn't but 2 of them want to be in that business.
[00:14:09]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
But I have known, we've known each other all our lives.
[00:14:14]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
Some were older than me, and
[00:14:17]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
y'know like that, but-- and finally, about 3 or 4 years ago the last one passed.
[00:14:27]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
That was, since my mother passed,
[00:14:31]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
and one of the nephews
[00:14:37]

{SPEAKER name="Lula Adams"}
was an army officer. I knew the boy, the young man's father. and --
[00:14:45]

Transcription Notes:
Please read INSTRUCTIONS before transcribing. In them you learn how to put in the speaker's name, and how to do Timestamps, etc... Look at other pages in this group of tapes to find names of speakers, etc... We don't put the conversation next to the Speaker name. I can tell the transcriber did not read INSTRUCTIONS. Cleaned up the existing transcript. Updated syntax for speaker and moved speaker and conversation onto separate lines. Double checked existing transcript and marked for review. ---------- Reopened for Editing 2023-03-30 18:05:49 cleaned up the [[?]] At 7:32 - double checked the street names on a map of Memphis (this locale is less than a mile from her address on N Front);