A rural youth
Samuel and Leonia remember their youths. They took long walks or bus rides to get to school, returned home to work by latern light or attend prayer meetings, and somehow avoided snake bites.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Samuel James (S. J.) and Leonia Farrar, May 28, 2003. Interview K-0652. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- PEGGY VAN SCOYOC:
-
So after you both got through elementary school, were you able to go on
to high school, and where did you go?
- SAMUEL JAMES FARRAR:
-
Apex High School then. That was Apex Consolidated School. No, the first
name was Apex Colored School, and then the second name was Apex
Consolidated School, which means they consolidated Friendship School,
Clark School and New Hill School. That's when they put all of
the children in Apex and called it Apex Consolidated School and closed
all of those smaller schools. Put us walking along, just riding the bus.
She would get on the bus, I guess, 6:00 in the morning, 6:30?
- LEONIA FARRAR:
-
No, we got home at 4 o'clock.
- SAMUEL JAMES FARRAR:
-
And you'd ride the bus two or three hours to get to
school.
- LEONIA FARRAR:
-
Oh, five, six, we had to be there about 7 o'clock and we had
to be on the school campus by 9 o'clock back there then.
- SAMUEL JAMES FARRAR:
-
Ride the bus all that time, then get home and then work from that until,
from then until, by lantern light.
- PEGGY VAN SCOYOC:
-
You'd work by lantern light, out in the fields by lantern
light?
- SAMUEL JAMES FARRAR:
-
Yes Ma'am. That's how we attended tobacco barns, no
such thing as electricity. She's got one of those lanterns
here now. I don't see why the snakes didn't get us
and kill us, but they didn't. I guess snakes thought we were
part of them. None of us ever got snake-bitten and
it's really a mystery. We used to walk, my family has been
church-folk all their lives. My Great-Grandfather was a preacher, Farrar
Green, he was a local preacher. Then my Grandfather become a local
preacher, then my father become a local preacher, and now
it's four or five of us in the ministry now out of that
Farrar clan. Mama and Daddy would take us to prayer meetings,
we'd walk two and three miles at night, on a Wednesday night
and sometimes on a Saturday night, and we had to go through woods and
valleys and whatever. Walk on logs that were across the creeks with no
lights. I don't know why those moccasins didn't
pay any attention to us, but they never did. Didn't any of us
ever get snake-bitten. I don't know of any of us getting
spiders on us. And none of us died from any, picking up ticks or
whatever, and they was out there too and we were right in the midst of
them and never heard of such.