ABSTRACT
Ida L. Moore’s interview of “the Haithcocks,” done in West Durham, N.C., in July 1938, starts like this:
Down in Monkey Bottoms in a small four-room house there lives a family of four women, two men, and four children. The house in which they live is typical of the houses in this section of the mill village. Monkey Bottoms begins with a washed-out, hilly road, flanked on one side by closely-placed and disorderly-looking houses and on the other by a jumbled growth of hedge, scrubby trees and briars. … In the particular house already mentioned Haithcocks, Ways, Fosters, and Piners live in dreary confusion. … Freida Haithcock and Hulda Foster sit in this room hours at a time, both fortified by a generous quantity of snuff, tagging the tiny sacks and dreaming of the day when they will again have a job in the mill. Together they share a tin can spittoon which is obligingly shifted from one to the other as the need arises. Flies swarm thickly about the poorly screened house and hunt out the bread crumbs scattered by the three oldest children.
The walls give one the impression that some member of the mixed family has made calendar collecting a pastime. Over the mantelpiece enlarged pictures of departed relatives hang crookedly against the wall. On the mantelpiece, the central feature is a large picture entitled “Christ in Gethsemane Praying.” On one side of the picture stands a blue and silver tinselled combination with the words, “Book of Life; Is My Name Written There,” and on the other, a simply framed assurance, “Jesus Never Fails.” 1
