Laura Newman Interview on Funerals

Laura Newman being interviewed by Nicki White

...There was no funeral homes you was took to. And you had a white handkerchief, and kept it wet with campor, they brought campor, and you laid that over their face and they never changed colors. Just as pretty as they was when they died, and that’s what people done then. And people just came to the houose and visited them. They stayed right at home, had their funerals at home and stay until they was took to the cemetery. Oh mercy, ain’t things changed. And back then you never heard tell of a nursing home. We wouldn’t have known what ya was talking about. We never heard tell of it. People, my uncle laid in bed seventeen years, aunt Mariah’s husband. Dad’s dad’s and he laid sick in bed seventeen years. She didn’t have no children, and she waited on him. I had to go help her with everything as soon as I would get up and eat breakfast I would. She raised everything in the garden, potatoes, and cane, and corn. All kinds of stuff and I’d work all day long for twenty-five cents a day. I’d come home with every one of my fingers with big white blisters on them. Oh, we digged all day long in the cc...corn field, and cane field, and potatoes. Now you had sore hands. I ,well, will never forget that. When we, we had a molasses. We had a great big molasses mill. And a horse someway just went around, and around, and around, and around; and you set in the chair took the cane stalks between those two big round hankies. They went around and around, and that cane would go through. Have ya a container to catch the juice. It was green as grass. Then, take ya all night long to boil the molasses off. Had a building built out and it was rocked up about that high or a big pan. When you made your molasses in that you had to boil them till all that green left them and get them thick. Now them’s the best days of our life, I’m telling the truth. Sounds to you that’d be awful, but we looked forward to that. We loved it. And then we’d all go to the cane field and the first thing we’d do, we’d cut the blade, pull the blades off. Put them on a slab and haul them to the barn with the cows. Then we’d take a knife and cut the tops off, cane seed. You know they would be about that big longways, just the seeds. We’d cut them tops off, take them to the barn. Then we’d cut the stalks, take them to the cane mill. Oh, we looked forward to it....