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Interview with Sanji Watson

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Interview with Sanji Watson

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Interview with Sanji Watson

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  • Watson 1 Interviewee: Sanji Watson Interviewer: Mary Martinez Date: 2018-10-20 Location: Sylva, NC Interview with Sanji Watson Mary Martinez: Please give me your name and date of birth for the record. Sanji Watson: Sanji Willene Talley, and I was born in Sylva, Jackson County, June 26, 1965 at 6:32 in the morning. MM: Boy, you know everything. How do you spell your middle name? SW: W-I-L-L-E-N-E. MM: And where did that come from? SW: My momma, that's her middle name, and my granddad always said that she was the most expensive kid that she had because she cost him two gallons of liquor. MM: What? SW: Years ago, Blackwood’s Lumber Company had a company and they let the company doctor go out in the community and doctor people. And so when my grandma come time to have Mama, Granddad sent for Doc Will Woody. Well, needless to say, Grandpa and Doc Woody stayed down the stairs in the store; my Mama was born upstairs in the store up on Nigger Skull Creek in Tuckaseegee and Grandpa and Grandma lived upstairs, and they run the store for my great grandpa. So, Will and Papaw stayed downstairs, got drunk, and my grannies which is my great grandmothers, two of them delivered my mama. So my granddad was drunk, and he says, “Well, we’re going to name her after the Doc, so they named her Woody, and her middle name was Willene. So when I was born, she gave me her middle name. MM: So your grandmother's name was Woody? SW: My mother's name was Woodie, W-O-O-D-I-E. MM: My goodness, named after the doctor. SW: Named after the doctor. And Will was his first name, and they just stuck E-N-E on the end of it. Well, my mama’s baby sister, her name is Joyce Eucella. And my grandad was a very well-known moonshine maker in this part of the county, and he'd run a run of liquor and he'd be gone for a while. Well when it come time for Grandma to have Eucella, he was gone, and word had got back to her that he was laid up with an Indian woman down in Eucella. So she named her Eucella. [Laugh]. MM: Oh my gosh; that is so funny. Why did—You said that it cost— Watson 2 SW: Because him and the doctor got drunk on a gallon of liquor and then he had to pay him the gallon even though he didn't deliver. MM: Okay. SW: You know, back then, just from doing research and stuff, back in those days, it was maybe like $20-$25 at the most if somebody come out and delivered a baby, $10 was average. But they would barter. I come and deliver a young’un, you’d buy me a gallon of liquor, Grandad did. MM: Wow. SW: He always said she was his most expensive young’un. MM: And is Talley T-A-L-L-Y or T-A-L-L-E-Y? SW: E-Y. MM: Okay. SW: That’s my dad. He was from Rabun County, Georgia, in what we called the Georgia quarter. If you go from Highlands and go down Highway 28, you cross over into Georgia, and it's only like maybe nine or 10 miles at the most ‘till you hit South Carolina and they call that the Georgia quarter and he was raised in Blue Valley and their nearest neighbor was a mile away and when you got half a mile in, you went through a fence – it was made out of two iron bedposts, you know, headboards. And on the north side, if you are in North Carolina, and on the south side you were in Georgia. MM: I’ll be darn. SW: And the house was started by my second great grandpa, was just a small one-room house with a little kitchen attached to it, and then as the family grew, the house got bigger. And it had a tin roof, and the steps going down to it from the road was the roots of a huge hemlock tree. MM: Wow. SW: Yeah. I loved it back there. MM: Did you visit often? SW: All the time. We were real close to my papaw and my grandma, that was on my Daddy’s side. My Mama’s mama died when I was six years old and I can remember the day she died. And then my granddad lived with us the last five years of his life, and he was something else. But yeah, we were real close to my papaw and grandma. They—not speaking ill of the dead, but my daddy wasn't much of a daddy. My papaw and grandma, which was his parents, try to keep an eye on us and to help us. Two of his brothers stepped up and helped us. MM: Would you say you were closest to your grandparents than anybody else? Or was that the family members you are closest to, or? SW: My mama, she was my best friend. MM: Ahh. Watson 3 SW: She was there for everything. MM: And what was she like? SW: Everybody knowed her. You could go to Tuckaseegee now and they'd all tell you about her. She was—to me she was beautiful. I look nothing like her. She was a very unassuming woman, and she give you the shirt off her back. And it didn't matter if we just got up from the supper table and had washed dishes, you'd come to her house, we had to feed you. And she was a very religious woman. The week she was dying, there was over 500 people come to my mama's house. MM: Wow. SW: It was right after the two hurricanes had come through here in 2004, and they had told us two weeks before that dialysis wasn't working anymore, and she wouldn't let me tell nobody. So after the hurricanes come through and me and her had that wild ride on Friday where we were going around mudslides and downed trees and stuff to get her to dialysis, she said, “That’s it. No more.” And by that time, she had a hole in her side you could put a Coke can through. So on Tuesday she decided that was it, she ain't doing it no more. She told the nurse; they called hospice. Family and friends started coming in and from that Tuesday morning until the following Wednesday after her funeral, we were just never alone. MM: Wow; she was very loved. SW: And there was people come from Charlotte, down in South Carolina, and Georgia, and Tennessee, and Virginia, and everything where to pay their respects to my mama. MM: Wow. How old were you when she died? SW: 39. She was 62. MM: That’s young; that's really young. SW: Her mama died at 60. Her sister Ruby Jean died at 61. Mama died at 62. Eucella died at 65, and Opal Lee died at 72. She outlived ‘em. Granddad was 79. They all died young. MM: Yeah, they all died young. SW: I'm hoping I get the genes from the other side. MM: Yeah, definitely. Was it all kidney disease or different things? SW: No, my grandmother started out as cervical cancer, and you know back in the early seventies, they didn't do much. And they went in and operated on her and they said when the air hit it, it just exploded. MM: Oh my God. SW: And it went everywhere. And she lived maybe I think two months after they operated. Ruby died from complications from diabetes. Eucella died from complications of diabetes. My mama died from complications of diabetes, and my granddad, he died in Mary Washington Hospital in Richmond. He was up visiting mom‘s sister, and he died of complications of diabetes because he got drunk and it set his sugar too high. Watson 4 MM: Oh no. SW: Yeah, he was the moonshiner. So kidney disease has been there, but you do what you got to the disease, diabetes, so— MM: Tell me about any brothers and sisters. How many did you have? SW: I have a brother, Darryl. He's four years younger than I am. He was born in Cleveland County. Mama and Daddy had left here when I was a year old and went to Gaston County to work in the textile mills. So at the time Darryl was born we were living—where were we at then? We were out off of Myrtle School Road in Gastonia. And then DeRonda is six years younger than me, and she was born in Cleveland County, and when she was born, we were living out next to Kings Mountain Battleground. The woods behind our house was the woods for the battleground, which we'd often go through the woods and go play in the park, and the park rangers got to know us. And they put us in the trucks and drivers around with them and I think that's where my history thing comes from. But then we moved back up here. I have a stepmother who is still alive. My father's deceased too. He died in Panama. MM: Really? SW: He and my stepmother retired down there because she was Panamanian. I have a stepsister, Wanda, who is a Register of Deeds in Reno, Nevada. Never met her. MM: Really? SW: I have a half-brother; his mother's my stepmother, who is three months younger than my brother, and he lives in Los Angeles California. He works as a paralegal at the largest law firm in there and he was in Afghanistan, got hurt, but he's okay now. Never met him. And then we have one that we call “the shit.” It's either a she, he, or it; were not sure what it is, but it's about three or four months younger than my sister, from down around 96, South Carolina. It wouldn't surprise me any for somebody to knock on the door and say, “Hey, I'm your brother or sister.” That's just the kind of man my daddy was. So that's all of us. MM: Tell me about growing up. Were your parents married? SW: My mom and dad and her sister Euchella, and Donny Moore run off, they eloped to Walhalla in June, 9th day of June, 1964. And Glenda Prince, one of Mama’s and Euchella’s cousins, and Rodean one of my daddy’s sisters went with them as witnesses, and they run off and got married. In they didn't even have rings, so Donny and Eucella used Glenda's, and daddy and mama used Rodean’s. They got married and they come back. They dropped Rodean off in Highlands and they brought Mama and Glenda and Eucella and left them at my great grandpa's, at Poppy’s. And then they went back to Highlands. Nobody knowed they was married but the two girls until about a week later when Donny's mom was cleaning out pants pockets, you know everybody didn't do laundry every day back then. When she was cleaning out pants pockets, she found the marriage certificate, and so she went out to Highlands Country Club where her husband Charlie was working and said. “Hey, have you seen this?” So they went and got Donny and they went and got Daddy and made them come and get them. They had been married a whole week before they ever even stayed together. MM: How old were they? Watson 5 SW: Mama was 22. Daddy was 21. MM: That’s pretty old, right, for this area? SW: Yeah. And how they met was my mama was a soda fountain girl at the Rexall in Highlands. She got that job after high school. She was the only one of her sisters that ever finish school. My granddaddy – he used to be when I was growing up, I'd read; I was reading at four and I'd read all the time. And if he ever caught me reading, he take the book away from me. Larnin’ ain’t for girls.” MM: Really? SW: But then two years before he died, he bought me a Christmas present – the first Christmas present he ever bought me, and I still have it. It was the complete works of, I think it was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow because he wanted me to read him “Evangeline” and “Hiawatha” and all that because he couldn't read. MM: Wow. SW: So of a night, I’d have to sit and read that to him while we were doing whatever, our chores of the night. MM: That’s an amazing story. SW: That's the only thing he ever bought me, and I still have it. And he died in 1979. I was seven years old when he give it to me. MM: How old were you? SW: Seven. MM: No kidding. Wow. And you could read that then? SW: I read “Gone With The Wind” before I was 10. MM: Wow. SW: Yeah. MM: So when they found the marriage certificate, then your parents started living together? SW: Uh huh. And Daddy and Mama lived over on East – what is the name of the place? It's going towards Franklin, I can't think of the name of it right now, but they lived over there and that's where they lived when she was carrying me. And Grandma got up one morning and she said, “Red, you need check on Woodie, so him and my uncle Randy got in the truck and they come to East Fork to check on mama and they found her in labor. MM: Oh my gosh. SW: And my Daddy was nowhere to be found, hadn't been at home in a week. MM: Oh my goodness. Watson 6 SW: So they took her to the hospital and Randy stayed with her while Papaw went to Tuckaseegee and got my grandma and granddad and he come back and drop them off. Then he went below Highlands and got my grandma and brought her over. So Randy convince my mama to let him name me. MM: Yes, how did you get Sanji for a name? SW: He named me after the ambassador from Russia’s daughter that went to school at Rabun Gap-Nachoochee School. The Russian Embassy’s not in Washington; it’s in Atlanta, Georgia, and Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School used to be a very, very, very prestigious boarding school. And she went to school there and because Papaw and Grandma and my great uncle Dan and my great uncle Louis were farm families; that's how they supported the schools by farm families. Their kids got to go to the school. So Randolph was the one that went to school there; we'd call him Randy, and he was so in love with this girl, he thought if he could get Mama to let him name me after her and he went back and told her at school, he'd score a point; it didn't work. So that’s how I got my name; my uncle Randy named me. Now here's the kicker. Thank God they didn't let Papaw name me. My papaw, which is my dad's daddy, is one of 10 children. Every one of them, their names starts with L’s. My papaw and grandma had 11 children, and this is their names: Ronald, Russell, Randolph, Relton, Raburn, Rena, Reba, Rodean, Roberta, Revylon, and Ramona. Thank God he didn't name me. There ain't no telling what it would be. MM: Oh my goodness. SW: Yeah, Mama went to the hospital on Thursday, had me on Saturday. Daddy didn't show up ‘til two days later and they had to get out and find him, and I know where he was at. I've been told. Him and this woman evidently had an affair the whole time they were alive. She was married; he was married, but it went on, even went on after him and my mom got divorced, and he married my stepmother. MM: Wow. SW: Yeah, so— MM: So what was your childhood like? SW: Different. Daddy always worked off; he worked construction jobs. He run drills. Mama was at home with us. MM: Did he send money home to care for you? SW: He was home weekends; we were poor. We didn't realize it but looking back on it we were poor. MM: What was your house like? SW: Mama had inherited some land from her poppy. We were living in Gastonia when he died, and Mama inherited land from him. And she wanted to come back to the mountains ‘cause she hated it down there. So she, she made the arrangements for a Jim Walter home to be built on that property. You know back then it was just shells. You got the outside, roof, and two by fours to mark off the rooms and that was it. No electric, no water, no nothing. We lived over on Skeener and Franklin while they built the house over here. And before there was any power, any water, any bathroom, anything, Daddy made us move into it because he was tired of paying rent in Franklin. So we moved into this house and it had no electricity, no running water, no bathroom. We had a five-gallon bucket with a toilet seat on it. I'll never forget that, and we had to take that every day. We carried water; we had a wheelbarrow, and we put in Watson 7 it filled gallon jugs up at the spring head, up across the hill from Grover and Dessie’s house, and we carry water every day. And Mama had met this man and woman when she worked in Highlands, Mr. and Mrs. Jordan, what their first names was, I cannot tell you. That's all I ever knew ’em by. But he had been a Queen’s Guard, and they had been friends with Mama, and they had a house in Highlands, and every time they come to Highlands they’d come and check on us. So one day, him and the little German man, don't know what his name is, they come to the house and found out we was living with no electricity, no running water, no bathroom, no walls up, no nothing, and he went ballistic. So he paid for our house to be plumbed and had electricity put in. And then I'll never forget that summer, him and the German man come back and me and him, and the two of them and me and Mama and Granddad would put up the sheet rock in the whole house. Any work done on the house me, Darryl, and DeRonda done it once we got big enough. The water would freeze; we eventually got water, black pipe running from the spring to the house, it'd freeze, and we have to thaw it out. We finally got – we dig so much every summer ’til we got the waterline buried, and we learn to plumb; we learn to hang sheet rock, and everything that was done to my mama's house, we done it. MM: So your mother and the kids and the two nice gentlemen were the ones that built that house. SW: Umm, hmm. My Daddy wouldn’t do nothing. He did. I just lied, and I apologize for that. One July I had went to work at 14 to take care of Mama and the kids, ’cause Daddy didn’t care. And me and Mama had scraped and scrounged ’til we had got enough to buy the insulation to go in the attic of the house. And he’d come home that weekend and it was in July and it was so hot. And I never forget it, Mama asked him, she said, “Russell, will you put the insulation up in the attic?” And he pitched one more fit. So I told her, I said, “Mama, don’t worry about it; I’ll do it, y’all just hand it up to me” and he got up, he did because it made him mad. He got up there and help me put the insulation in the attic of the house. That's the only thing he ever done. MM: Wow. So how long did you live in that house? SW: It’s still standing. My sister lives there now. I lived in it until I was 19, and when I moved out, I moved in a Volkswagen with the exception of a baby crib, and I moved out when my son was born. MM: Wow. So tell me about—Okay, so you started working on the house as soon as you were able. I want to know about the chores you had, how you worked before you got your first job. What kind of work did you do around the house? SW: We had to chop wood because we had wood heat. We had to make sure that the wood was brought in every night; we had to carry water. We worked in the garden. My granddad was a very firm believer that if the sun was up, you were supposed to be up, and he would come through and he'd say, “Get up, we gotta get in the garden,” because we always had a huge garden. We plant like two acres of Indian corn and we’d have a huge garden with everything you can think of – potatoes, corn, beans, squash, zucchini, mustard, turnips, and whatever it was, we grew it. MM: That’s how you ate, right? SW: Yeah, that’s what we had. We raised hogs, so we had to feed the hogs. We had chickens, and we had to feed the chickens. We had rabbits, we did that. We had things that we had to do, but my job in the morning especially on school mornings, I had to get up and stoke the fire up, so it got warm for everybody else to get up. Watson 8 MM: And how old were you? Do you remember when you started that? SW: About seven or eight. First time I can ever remember cooking a meal, I was six and stood in a chair. MM: Wow. SW: Yeah. We canned everything; what we couldn’t can, we froze. We had a meat house out back, and on the left-hand side the meat was there, we had salt and black pepper on it, and if it was on the right side, it had brown sugar and salt. But you didn't mix the two; if you did, you got in trouble. We had to chop wood, cut down trees. We worked like people our age didn't. We plowed. MM: Your brother and your sister helped? SW: Before I got my very first official paying job, there was a man here who grewed flowers for a florist, and he hired women to come and cut them and their children could work, and we got paid a whole dollar an hour. MM: Wow, that was a lot then, huh? SW: Well, minimum wage at that time was less than $2.90 so that was good money. But we’d go and be in those fields before daybreak ‘cause you had to cut ‘em before the sun hit ‘em ‘cause when the sun hit ‘em, they opened up. So way to go and cut flowers and all the women would bring different things and at lunch time we go over and sit down at the edge of the field and all eat together. And the little kids, they’d spread a blanket out and let them sit at the edge of the field, and we done flowers, and we picked green beans. MM: How old were you then when you did the flower thing? 12? SW: 12. MM: So tell me about the plowing. You mentioned the plowing. SW: I was taught to do things just like the boys was. ‘Cause there was more boys my age than girls. But we were taught to plow, either single-tree or double-tree which means one horse, or two, and that's how we plowed because we didn't have a gas-powered or any kind of tractor, we had plows. And the neighbors had two big old Belgians, Dan and Little Ann, and they did all the plowing, and then when I got to be about 12, they got to teaching me how to plow. So they'd hook me up, here it is I'd have this plow and it was bigger than I was the end, and we these old Belgians and out through there you go. You tie the harness around your neck, put a knot in it and put it around your neck, and I got good at taking my teeth, and go in and get in the harness and pulling it to the left and right, so I wouldn't let go of the handles. Yeah, and then where I got to where I could plow pretty good, I went and plowed fields for other people. MM: No kidding? Did they pay you? SW: They paid Granddad. They didn’t pay me; they paid Granddad. MM: Oh wow, that’s wild. SW: But, yeah, and then in later years there is two little fellas out here running around. They were so proud they were going to plow days and two of ‘em was plowing, one was with the plow, and one was Watson 9 with the horses, and I told ‘em they was wusses. And they said, “What do you mean?” And I said, “A real person can plow one person.” “Oh, no, you don't know what you're talking about.” And I said, “Oh, yeah, I do.” And I told ‘em, hey, you hook up to the harness and the plow and how you grab the reins in your mouth and pull if you didn't feel like letting go and all this other stuff, and if you don't believe me, go ask your grandpa. So a couple of weeks later, they come to me and they said, “Wow, we can't believe that.” And I said, “I told you, you was wusses.” [Laugh] MM: That’s crazy. Now when the boys were doing it, what did they hold? How do you do a two-person plow? SW: One would be in the back with the plow, holding it, because you can't just turn it loose, you don't just hold it, you have to hold it and kind of pressed down so that it would dig down into the ground, but one would be there, and one would be off, not quite even with the horses, kind of back at a diagonal with them with the harness leading them MM: And you did both at the same time, and then did the reins with your teeth. Holy cow. SW: I was raised to work like a man. Used to be if it rained like it is today, it's not really a hard rain, it's just rain, our road would be impossible, you couldn't get a vehicle in it. So we raised Indian corn. Now I told you before we planted two acres at a time for more, and we would take that Indian corn and get it ground. Now part of it we would have ground into cornmeal because that's what we used, and the rest of it we have ground into hog feed, and then put it into 100-pound sacks. Now when it was bad, and you couldn't get in and out, a lot of times in the winter, we had to park in the graveyard and walk in. You’d come up and you'd have four or 500 pounds of hog feed, and you can't get it home, you had to carry it. So you know it wasn't nothing to throw 100 pounds of hog feed on your shoulder and take off or throw it up on your back and go on. I was just raised to work like a man. MM: Was your sister also? SW: No, no. MM: Just you. Why do you think that was? SW: Because I was the oldest and I would do it. And I guess it was because I was always raised that family came first. Your family was your most important thing. My mama always used to tell us, she said, “You know, people always want better for their families.” She says, “A nice house, a fancy car, lots of money,” she said, “that’s good, and I'd love for my children to have that,” but she said, “That ain't the main thing I want.” And I guess she felt this way because of how my daddy had done her. She said that she wanted us to find somebody to love us for us, nobody else but us, and that we had a family, and that we were close, and that we loved each other. She said that's all she ever wanted for her children. So you know we was raised close to my grandparents, close to my great aunt, my mama’s mother’s sister, the middle one, she was our grandma because our grandma died when I was six years old. So she was our grandmother; she was always in and out of our house. She used to get onto my mama, “Woodie, you’re going to kill that young’un.” But I guess I grew up faster than most kids did. MM: It sounds like you are kind of taking your father's place in a way. SW: I did. At 14 I went to work. I turned 14 on Friday. On Saturday, I went to work in the cabbage fields planting cabbage, the Tuckasegee Straits. We was up at the pull bed at daybreak, pulled enough Watson 10 cabbage plants to last until lunch and then we go plant cabbage plants all day long. And then at lunch we go back to the pull beds and plant more if we needed them. What we planted cabbage, and broccoli, and all kinds of stuff. That was a hard job. And I'll never forget my very first paycheck. I took it to my mama and I gave it to her. And she bought something she had wanted for years. MM: What was it? SW: A screen door. A screen door. MM: I bet you just felt like… SW: I was doing something because mama got something she didn't have.…(gets emotional) I had seen my mama she would used to put duct tape around her shoes because we didn’t have money to buy things. We were out getting wood one weekend, I don’t know, Darryl and DeRonda were both in school, and this man had brought some property up in Hunter Flats, and he told us we could have wood off of it if we'd clean the underbrush. So my mama’s best friend and her husband, we all done it together, and we cut them a load of wood. Then we loaded us a load. And he had a three-quarter ton truck we hauled in on. We were loading the truck, a truck of wood one day, and mama and her friend was setting there on the stone, and my brother stepped up on the back end of the truck and went over the tailgate to stack it, you know we were throwing it in and he was going to stack it. When he did, he ripped the straddle out of his britches, and my mama just set down and cried because that was the only pair of britches he had (gets emotional). MM: Oh my gosh. SW: (Still emotional). We were poor. We were poor. I didn't know that cornbread was anything but blue for years until I went to school ‘cause all I'd ever had was Indian cornbread. It was hard. MM: So you brought that paycheck home and you got to buy her finally something she wanted. That must have made you feel really good. SW: Yeah, I gave it to her and she bought a screen door. I remember when it got hung; mama's best friend’s husband hung it for us. He was a carpenter up in Highlands, Cashiers, built houses up there He went and picked it up and brought it back. He hung it in the door, and I remember my mama setting there with vinegar and a newspaper washing it; she just kept washing it, and every time you looked, she was washing it that whole day. MM: Oh my God. SW: She was proud of that door. MM: Yeah. SW: So, when I was a freshman in high school, I got a job at Western working in Dotson cafeteria after school and on weekends. And we get paid once a month. MM: And this was at Western University? SW: Western Carolina University. MM: And they had a cafeteria. Watson 11 SW: Dotson cafeteria was where the steps in the fountain end. It was a round building. There was-- back then you have three options: you could eat at Brown cafeteria, Dotson cafeteria, or the Townhouse Restaurant, that was it. There was no Chick-fil-A and Moe’s and all that stuff. So I'd work after school and on weekends. And then in the summertime, I work two or three jobs just to get money, you know to take care of mama and the kids. And I think I was a junior in high school, I paid off the house. MM: Oh Sanji. SW: Ninety-six dollars a month. MM: Sixteen years old and you paid off the house. SW: Ninety-six dollars a month. I’ll never forget that. Mama set there and cried. She said, “Sanji,” she said—Mama had to fight to get money from Daddy for anything; she had to fuss at him not physically fight, but fuss at him. And once I went to work, I pay the light bill, and we had a phone was on the party line which was a hoot, and I paid the house payment. We went to the store once a month and we got sugar in 25-pound bags and I can remember my mama having to sign a piece of paper saying she wasn't using it to make liquor with. And we bought pinto beans in 100-pound bags and that’d last us a month. And we bought flour and we bought salt. We didn't buy iodized salt; we bought 10, 15-pound bags of pickling and canning salt at the time ‘cause we would put up stuff with it. We used more of it than anything and when we were growing up and lived in Gastonia, we live just down from a dairy, so we always had fresh milk. And then when we lived in Franklin when we was building our house here, my uncle Dan had a dairy, so he gave us milk. So when we moved to Tuckasegee we couldn't get milk, so mama would buy powdered milk, and I can remember it being in the big old box if everything worked out okay and we had some extra money and we didn't need it, it was something else for us to come to Hooper’s Drug Store; it was on Main Street in Sylva at that time. They had a soda bar in there for us to get a hot dog. We were in high class when we could get a hot dog. Now a lot of people thought that was strange. Kids at school we talk about doing this and that, and that and this, and I would never say nothing because mama didn't want nobody to know how bad things were sometimes. But we was raised to work hard, and when you have a job, you worked. You gave it your all. And until two years ago, I've never had just one job in my life, I've always had two or three that I would work. And it was anywhere from 12 to 15 hours a day that I would work, but that's the way I was raised. If you had a job, you went in and you done your job, and if you had to, you stepped up. So it wasn't easy; I've had a lot of jobs over my life. You know I'm only 52 years old, but I worked in the fields, in the vegetable fields, flower fields. I’ve worked in the Christmas trees, now that's an experience; that's a hard job but you make good money in it. I've worked in the florists. I worked as a secretary in the school. They used to have a program here that they would take underprivileged kids and get them jobs for the summer. So in between my junior and senior year, I worked at the high school in the office. That was my job. That year my brother worked at the animal shelter up on the hill. We didn't have a car. We mare shanked a lot. MM: You did what? SW: Oh, I’m sorry, we walked a lot. MM: What did you say? Marched? SW: Mare shanked. Watson 12 MM: Mare shanked? SW: Yeah. That’s where you walk a lot where you're going to. You gotta remember I tell everybody I'm bilingual; I can speak normal English, but then I can speak home. MM: Well what is mare shanked? I mean, where does that come from? Walking. I mean the mare has a shank, right? Shank, is that where that came from? SW: I don’t know. MM: You don’t know. SW: I’ve just always heard it. When you had to walk everywhere, you had to mare shank. MM: That’s interesting. SW: My papaw—The family had been over here from Ireland from years, but he had a lot of Irish things he said. My grandpa went over when I was born, they had their own though things like, Aig that was egg, and I didn't know what a refrigerator was until I read about it in a book, and I said, “Mama,” and she said, “What?” and I said, “Is this what I think it is?” And she said, “What do you think it is?” And I said, “Is that a fridgadair?” and she said, “Yeah,”: because that's all I ever heard it called my whole life, “Go to the fridgadair” and get whatever. That’s all I ever knowed. And they’d talk about, “Well, somebody’s sick and there down there in that horse pistol.” MM: Horse pistol? SW: Horse pistol. When I had my son, I was 19. I took him up on the mountain above the house to see Dessie. Now she was related to my grandma and to my granddad and so was her husband. But she was such a good woman. Lord, I love that woman to death. I still have the quilt she made me for graduation. She set on her couch and handstitched every piece of it and hand-quilted it on her lap. And she used to make crocheted rugs. Some of her kinfolk work down in South Carolina in a T-shirt factory, and they would bring her rolls of that stuff they put around the necks of T-shirts, and when they get it it'd be real wide and she would send it down to the house and once we got our chores done for the night, got our homework done, we'd set and cut it into strips for her and she'd make rugs out of it and she’d crochet them on her finger. She didn't have a hook or nothing. MM: Wow, I didn't even know you could do that. SW: And she made us all rugs, and I still have two of the rugs she made me, still have the quilt she made me. But I took him to show her the baby. She sent word to bring that baby up there, so I took him up there, and she was loving on him, and she said, “Are you nursing him?” I said, “No, they won't let me,” and she said, “Okay, you need some goat milk?” and I said, “No, not right now.” And then she's setting there and playing with him and he got to crying because he had a wet diaper. He was allergic to the plastic on diapers, so he had to wear cloth diapers, which was in a way a blessing ‘cause I couldn't afford 'em. I was changing him into others, and she said, “Have you got enough hippins?” MM: Hippins? SW: Hippins. And I looked at her real funny and I said, “What?” and she said, “Have you got enough hippins for the baby?” And I said, “Dessie, what are you talking about?” And she said, “Hippins!” and she Watson 13 pointed to the diaper. And I said, “Well, why are you calling it hippins?” And she said, “Watch this,” and she got up and she was an old woman then, she’d come over ‘cause I’ve changed him on the bed, and on the bed you could see in from the door she was setting, and she’d come in there, and she said, “Watch this,” and she took that big piece of cloth and she folded it into a triangle, and she laid him on it, and she folded over and up and pinned it right there in the middle, and she said, “hippins.” These are hip pins and you pin the diaper on him.” [Laugh]. I told her, “Yeah.” I think maybe a week or so later, I went up there, she said, “I bought you some more hippins, you ain’t never got enough, and she had sent somebody to Belks and she bought me a pack of Birdseye diapers. I still have those diapers somewhere. MM: You do? Wow. SW: I’m a pack rat. I have things you wouldn't believe, but I have the churn jar that belonged to my great-granny that's over 200 years old. MM: Sometime, you have to invite me over to your house and show me all your stuff. SW: I've got my grandma's pedal sewing machine. I've got the coffee grinder that belonged to my great grandpa. I've got old, old lamps that are about 200 years old that have been handed down through the family. MM: You’re an editor and a writer. It would be fun to do-- just go through your house and do that and take pictures of that stuff put in your – that would make a great story. SW: I've got a tea ball that belonged to my grandpa, my Papaw, Daddy’s, that belonged to his grandmother. MM: Wow, you’ve gotta do that, Sanji. Who else has that kind of stuff? SW: Gary Cardin aggravates me all the time that I need to write a book. MM: Yes! SW: Nah. MM: Nah? SW: Nah. MM: Let me write a book with you. SW: But you know, we was raised to work hard. MM: How did you raise your son? What's your son's idea of work? SW: He works two jobs every day. MM: Does he really? So he inherited your work-- so what did you teach him about work? Was it anything, or he just watched you? SW: I raised him on my own. When he was a year old, I went to college. I wanted to go to college. I had gotten a scholarship to Berea College in Kentucky and I didn't take it. MM: ‘cause you had to support your family? Watson 14 SW: Because I had to take care of mama and the kids and I always wanted to go to school because I love learning; I love reading. You know, if something catches my eye, I've got to find out about it or I can't rest; I just can't handle it. So I went to Southwestern Community College and my mama went with me. MM: No-o-o! SW: My mama wanted me to go to college. She wanted to be a nurse, and she was the only one to graduate high school, and Dave Pruitt what is the principal at Glenville high school when it was out on the lake and that's where my mama went. There was 12 in her graduating class. He and his wife Dorothy told my mama that if she wanted to go to college they would pay for and she could pay ‘em back when she got a job. And my granddad pitched a fit and wouldn't let her. So she never got to go. So me and her talked about it, and we decided we’re both going, so we did. And she went, back then it was quarters, and she went one quarter and then that's when we found out she was bad sick. So I went to Southwestern, worked two jobs, have the responsibility for mama and the kids all at the same time, and his daddy wasn’t in the picture; that was a good thing. But it was hard. MM: What did you take? SW: Criminal justice. MM: What did you want to do with it? SW: I wanted to work at the sheriff's office which, in a way, was funny, because my uncle John Dee used to run around run around with the sheriff, Fred Holcombe. Fred was sheriff here for 100 years. He was here for years, I mean literally 20-30 years or more. So Fred was sergeant at arms for the Sheriffs Association. He hung out with my great uncle John Dee up on Big Ridge. Now Fred was known to drink with my Uncle John Dee. They was up there one weekend and John Dee got to telling Fred about me going to school and all this other stuff and how I had to take care of mom and the kids, and Fred went to Raleigh to one of the Sheriffs Association's meetings, and he got me that scholarship. MM: Oh wow. SW: Yeah. But back then, it was $25 a credit hour. So then I did my intern at the Sheriff's Department, and I got a job in Cashiers working for Micah’s Restaurant. But I was also working the police department up there, the Sapphire Police, because, I'll be honest, I was doing undercover work. MM: Really? SW: Because a lot of stuff was coming up missing off the country club, and I went in to see what I could find out. Then when I left there, I went to work for Pinkertons Detective Agency. MM: No kidding? What was that like? SW: Weird. MM: Really? SW: I was on-call 16 hours a day. I took care of the ATM machines from Asheville West to Murphy. I had to be that I could get to any of the ATM machines within one hour of being called except for Murphy, they gave me two hours for it. Changed the things over every day, you know how you do, we had to do Watson 15 them every day. I can honestly tell you that not all money is hauled in armored cars. On one Fourth of July weekend, my company car set at my house with three quarters of a million dollars in it. MM: [Laugh]. How did you feel? SW: It was a job. MM: I know, but didn't it make you nervous to have three-quarters of a million dollars sitting out in your car? SW: No. MM: Wow! SW: I guess I was naïve, I don't know. To me it was a job, and it was a way to take care of what I had to take care of. But I also worked still at the country club of a night. You know I done that of a day, worked at the country club of a night, in the restaurants and stuff. I never just had one job. I always had more than one. MM: How long did you keep on with law enforcement? SW: Oh Lord, I don't know. My sister was working down here in Sylva, in a textile mill. They sent their jobs to Honduras, so they got to go to school, and my sister’s nothing like me. She's backwards and bashful, so she decided she was going to take them up on it, but she wouldn't go by herself. So I went back to school with her. MM: So what’d you take this time? SW: Paralegal, and I had a job before I ever graduated. I did get a two-year degree in five quarters. I made the Dean’s list every… MM: And worked at the same time. SW: I made Dean's list every quarter but one, and I missed it by 1/100 of a point, and I said, “Y’all could’ve give me that one.” MM: Yeah, really. SW: That was the quarter where my father-in-law had died, and all that good stuff, but yeah, and I worked while going to school. Had a family, had two kids by that time, a husband, and I worked for her for eight or nine years, and by that time mama was really bad, and I quit my job, and I was making good money, real big money, especially for here. She [attorney?] wasn't from here; she was from New York, and she was a medieval English teacher at a university in Louisiana, and she said, as she says, screwed over in a divorce and made her so mad, she went to law school. And she had some very-- we had a very spirited working relationship, let's put it that way. She was the one that gave Macon County hell every year for putting up the nativity scene up on the corner of the courthouse. Lord have mercy soon as they done it, she’d start calling, “You need to take that down, separation of church and state; she was something else. We had many fond conversations. But I left that to take care of my mama, ‘cause my mama, she sacrificed a lot for us; she really did. You know some people would've give up, but she didn't. She made sure – we didn't have the best in the world, but we had clothes to wear, we had food to eat. And there's one thing that we had that I tell my kids, and I tell my grandson this, we had something that Watson 16 90% of the kids in the world didn't have, an over-abundance of love. My grandson came to me one time, oh about two years ago; he's now 14. He said, “Mamaw, did you know we’re poor?” I said, “What are you talking about, Wesley?” He said, “We’re poor.” I said, “How do you figure we’re poor?” He says, “Well, they've been sending these food bags home with us from school.” You know the lunch bag things they do for the kids, and he says, “The kids at school been making fun of me for ‘em because only poor kids get ‘em.” And I said, “Let me tell you something, son. There is no shame in being poor. Some of the greatest people in this world started out poor. They worked hard; they stayed true to their selves, and they made it. And they made something out of yourselves, they didn't lay down and say, “Oh, woe is me, I’m poor, and stick their hand out. You work. You get it, you work for it, you will appreciate it more.” And I said, “Son, if they ever say anything else to you about being poor, tell them, ‘Yes, I am, and I'm proud of it,’ because you have something that those kids never had. You've had a family that loves you, that would move heaven and hell for you, and those kids don't.” “Okay, Mamaw,” and that was the end of that. MM: Beautiful. That was fabulous. SW: And I've always told Wesley, ‘cause my mama always told us this, she never got the education she wanted. She had dreams and they never come true, but she always told me, Darryl, and DeRonda, she would say, “Education is choices, not have-tos. If you are educated, you can make choices on what you do and how you do and where you go in life. You don't have to settle for second best.” My brother has a college degree; my sister has a college degree, and I have two. MM: Hats off to your mother. SW: Yep, and we did it all without Daddy. MM: Yeah. That’s great. SW: He left Christmas, the year Brad was born. Brad was two weeks old when my daddy left. Brad was born December 12, 1984, and 20th of December my Daddy left. And to be honest, it hurt my mama. My mama said she felt better if he would've died. Me, I'd been finding things all along in the car that I knew wasn't Mama's, and I throw them away or hide ‘em ‘cause I didn't want to hurt her. It wasn't until a few years later she told me she knew. I thought I was protecting her, but yeah. I've bartended, I worked in the flower shop, I worked for Pinkertons, I worked for the sheriff's department, private security, I've cleaned houses in Highlands and Cashiers. I had my hands in some of the richest people in the United States toilets, there is no shame in that. I worked in restaurants. Oh Lord, you know, just doing whatever I had to, to make the ends meet. Now, I was the oldest by a few years than the other two. They didn't have it is rough as I did because me and my mama made sure of that. Now my brother every once in a while throws up to me, “Yeah, I wanted to go to that football game and you told me you take me, and you didn't take me.” Well, you know I got an opportunity to work another shift that night, so I took it instead of taking you to the football. They don't remember— MM: The sacrifices you made. SW: No. And me and Mama was always close, but we got even closer before she died. We was setting in there one night – when she died, she was blind; she couldn't see. Had all this other stuff going on. We was setting in her bedroom; I was feeding her supper. Her favorite thing to eat was boiled cabbage with cornbread and mayonnaise mixed up. We eat that a lot growing up. A lot of nights that was all we had. Watson 17 To this day I find it hard to eat chicken ‘cause when we were growing up, granddad would holler, “It’s chicken-killing day, and oh God, we try everything in the world to get out of that, ‘cause it wasn't four or five, it was 40 or 50. MM: Oh my goodness. SW: Try that once. It’s not one of my favorite foods. But she was setting there, and she was talking to me about a lot of different things. She told me, she said “I want to tell you, I'm sorry.” And I said, “For what?” She says, “You never had a childhood.” And I said, “What are you talking about, Mama?” She said, “You had to grow up too soon.” And I said, “Well, Mama, somebody had to do it. He wasn't going to.” And she told me, she said, “Sanji, that's your daddy, and no matter what he done, you need to forgive him.” Until my mama drew her last breath, she loved that man (gets emotional) no matter all he done to her. I couldn’t be that gracious. MM: She sounds like a really loving, loving woman. SW: I couldn’t do it. But you know, me and her talked about a lot those last few months. I don't have any regrets, quit my job to take care of her, ‘cause she would've done it for me. If it was me in that she’d a done it. Now my brother and sister, they probably wouldn't give me an air in a jug, but she would’ve done it. MM: You were your mother’s child. SW: Well, she always used to tell me I was just like my daddy. MM: Really? SW: ‘Cause I had a temper. I have worked hard to control my temper over the years, and I used to be open mouth and out it come and there was no filters. I just told you what it was and how it was. And she always used to tell me that I was my daddy's daughter. And then I think maybe about two weeks before she died, she apologized to me. She said, “Sanji, I’m sorry,” and I said, “For what?” and she said, All these years, I said you was just like your daddy,” she says, “But I'm beginning to realize that you're more like me.” And I cried. My mama would’ve give you the shirt off her back. If she had something and you needed it, to give it to you. Let's see, Friday night the house was full of people, and she got to hollering for me, and I mean literally, the house was full of people. We had church that night. There was over 100 people there that night. She got to hollering for me and I was outside, out in the yard, and I went in there to see what she wants, and she says, “You need to get in there in the kitchen.” And I said, “What?” And she says, “You’ve got to bake some cakes ‘cause; they’re having that cake walk tomorrow night and you’ve gotta get some cakes baked.” I’ll never forget it. Alden Middleton was setting there beside her in the chair; my mama had a little brother who died when he was born, and Alden was the closest thing she had to a brother. And he told her, he said, “Woodie, don't you worry about that,” and she says, “I told her that we’d send some cakes.” So here it was, she was dying on Friday night, worried about her cakes got fixed for the cake walk the next night. So me and Betty and her sister Becky and Kim got in there in the kitchen and we baked three cakes and sent to that cake walk. Now, to tell you the truth, not a soul can remember who that cake walk was for. (Gets emotional). None of us can. That’s just the kind of person she was. When Alden fell off-- he fell off a three-story house up there at Cashiers on his head and like to have died. We had a cake walk to help pay his medical bills and help pay their living bills. People would call and say, “Woodie, if we bring you stuff, you bake a cake?” “Yeah, bring it on.” And Watson 18 what a lot of them didn't know for the last five or six years of her life, she didn't bake em because she wasn't able. It was me doing it when I came home from work. And I finally had to call up to Kim's. I said, “Kim, I need some help, bring your sisters.” So she brought Beverly and Karen and Judy, and Pat and Judy's daughter come with her, and there was four or five more to help me get them cakes finished. Now my brother had a queen-size bed. We spread a sheet out; it was as close as we could stack ‘em cake, had cakes everywhere. When all was said and done, there was 72 cakes at my mama’s house that night. Yeah, that was the kind of woman my mama was. MM: Oh my goodness, wow. SW: Yeah. When she died, visitation was supposed to be from six to eight. Thomasina called from the funeral home a little before four and she said, “Sanji,” I said “What?” She says, “Can I ask a question?” And I says, “What.” And she says, “Is there any way some of you all can get down here?” And I said, “Why,” and she said the line’s done on out the door.” And the line there was over here was the casket and it come down and went around and this room and back down the hall and out the door, so we hurried up and went. Mama died at 6:32 Sunday morning. They come and got her. At 10 o'clock, everybody that was at my mama’s house with the exception of my brother and my cousin Jess they were going to stay at the house. Every one of us went to church to honor my mama. We filled the church. So— MM: Wow, what a story. Thank you. That was incredible. SW: You know we come home from school and we have to come in and feed the animals. Then we had to eat supper and then we had to do our homework on my papaw’s and grandma’s table. It was bigger than this one. Had a bench down the side and chairs on the side, and we always had to set at that table and do our homework, so she knew we were doing her homework. But then if we got that done, we always had something else to do. If it was like this time of the year, we crack walnuts. And we had stumps in there and we cracked ‘em and throw ‘em off in a dishpan ‘til we get three or four dish pans full and then we set and pick them out. We cut quilt patterns out, and then we do ‘em and it’d just aggravate me to death, Darrell could make smaller quilt stitches than I could. MM: Oh really? SW: Oh, it used to make me mad, but she taught him how to sew and how to cook, and how to can and preserve food, just like we were taught. And then I was taught how to plow, and how to run up-- first time I ever drove a vehicle, I drove a loaded log truck. They taught me how to dig graves just like they taught the boys. We used to bring people home. MM: What do you mean? Dead people? SW: Umm, hmm. We’d bring ‘em home and sit up with the dead. We sure did. MM: I’m sorry; I don't mean to laugh. SW: [Laugh]. It used to be every time I thought of that, I’d think of that old song that Ray Stevens sings, sitting up with the dead where they raised up out of the coffin [Laugh]. The last one we did was Unalie, and before that it was Grover. Mama called me one morning about 6 o'clock and she says, “Can you get up here?” And I said, “I’ll be up there later today,” and she said, “No, can you get up here now?” And I said, “What’s the matter,” and she said, “Mary called down here; she’s hysterical.” I said, “What’s the Watson 19 matter?” and she said she found Grover dead. I thought, “Oh, God,” that wasn't my words, but-- I took off from my house in Cullowhee and went to Mama's, and then went up the mountain and Grover was there, and he had died in the night. Mary was his daughter-in-law and she was hysterical, didn't know what to do. And I called the sheriff's department and the funeral home and told them he passed away. And I don't know if you know what happens when people pass away, but I was the one to clean it up. We moved all the furniture out of the living room, even took the wood stove down so that they could get his casket in there and put straight-backed chairs and then it was my job to run the kitchen. People would bring food. Had a big old porch across the house, you know people out there, and we went to the church and got chairs, and went to the fire department and got chairs. And people just come in and out in and out and set up with the dead. By law, there had to be somebody in that room with it, you know 24-7, so we all took turns sitting in the room. New people would come in and pay their respects, and come in and eat, and sit out in the yard and laugh and talk. And Grover to me was one of the last mountain men there ever was. He said what he thought; he didn't care. Family graveyard’s just right out from my mama's house, out on this little knoll. When my aunt and uncle moved down there, they dug like a food storage, like a can house or whatever you want to call it underneath the bank, underneath the road. They dug it way back and had shelves built and bins, and it had a door on it. Some of the family come up to visit the graveyard; Grover was out there doing something; he was kind of like the caretaker of the graveyard. They asked him what that door down there on that bank was, and he said, “Well, I’ll tell y’uns, I got tired of coming out here every day and having to put dirt back on people when they got up to go get ‘em a drink of water, so,” he says, “I just built that door down there for ‘em so they can get in and out better.” You know them people didn't come back for years. That's the kind of man he was. MM: [Laugh]. SW: Oh my, I tell ‘ya. The night my daddy left, he was looking for a fight that night. I had finally managed to get a car; I had a 1972 Volkswagen Super Beetle; it was orange, his car had tore up, so he took my car, left us no vehicle. Was driving it backwards and forwards to work; he was working down on Spaghetti Junction in Atlanta then. And I told him, that was back when satellites were just coming out, and some people up the holler had gotten one, and they let all the kids come and watch movies on Friday nights. Yeah, it was a Friday night. I told him, I said, “Daddy, it's cold, I’m going to take my car and run all the kids to up to Sarah's to watch TV.’ “You ain’t taking that GD car.” And Mama said, “Russell, it’ll be all right.” And he started—I think he was looking for a fight. And I said, “All right, don’t worry about it.” So I bundled Brad up real good and I took a quilt, you know back then we didn’t have all this stuff peoples now days got for their kids, and I tied it around me and set him down in it and tied the rest of it up on my shoulders, you know put him on my belly, so he’d be warm, and we took out, walked up to Sarah’s to watch TV. When I come back, we got back to the house, him and Mama was arguing in the bedroom. Mama was setting on the side of the bed and Daddy was in her face, and I mean he was so mad. She said later, “Well you know, he was just stomping cockroaches.” That was her thing for when he was really mad, and he dropped back his fist to hit my mama, and Darryl told it later, he said, “The next thing I know there is a baby flying through the air.” He said, “She throwed him at me, and down the hall she went,” and I did. I knowed he wasn’t going to hit my mama. He had put her through enough without ever hitting her. And I shoved him, and so he turned on me. And he says, “Well, you think you are just the cock of the walk. Now meet me in the yard and I’ll show you whose boss.” And as I went through, I handed my sister my glasses, and I went in the yard and screamed for him to come to me because I was fed up. I was tired of it. What I didn't know was Grover and James had heard them fighting while we Watson 20 were gone, and they were sitting up on the rock wall. There was a rock wall across the field above my mama's house. Grover told me later that if Daddy had come out that door, they’d a shot him and killed him. He says, “I know enough places to bury somebody; they’d never know he was gone.” That was the night we left. I knowed he wasn’t going to hit my mama. Now, these ain’t for public consumption. Tape recorder turned off at subject’s request. MM: What I think is so interesting and unusual about you, Sanji, among other things, is that you do women’s work and men’s work. And there’s not a lot of people that do that. SW: I used to have to shake shakes. MM: Shake shakes? What do you mean? SW: They’d cut wood, and you’d cut it, I think it’s 14 inches long, a thing of wood. You always do on the light of the moon. MM: Really? You cut by the light of the moon? I’ve heard of planting by the moon. SW: You set it up, and you take what they call a straight ax. And it’s got an ax head on it. It’s got like a little hammer place here, and you take a hammer or whatever you got, and you set it up on that, and you hit it. And you can set it up to make bigger shakes, that they use like for roofs. I used to do that. But you do any wood cutting like posts for fields or anything, you cut them by the light of the moon. If you cut them in the dark of the moon, they draw, and they'll be crooked. Anything that grows underground like potatoes, sweet potatoes, you plant them in the signs of the knees down. Don't plant nothing in the signs of the feet, it'll rot. MM: What do you mean signs of the knees, down at the signs of the feet? SW: If you look at a old calendar, you can still get one at Harold’s, they'll have the signs on it, and it'll say like head, breasts, loins, legs, stuff like that. You don't plant nothing in the signs of the feet, it rot. You don't plant nothing in the signs of the loins, it'll rot. If it's corn, beans – arms, you plant at arms or above. So it'd be… MM: Wow, and you did that. That’s the way you and your mama did your gardens? SW: Umm Humm. You don't make any pickles in the signs of the loins, or in the signs of the feet. If you make sauerkraut, you make it by the light of the moon and the signs of the head, and that way it will be white and hard. MM: Wow. SW: What else you want to know? MM: Do you think? I mean, do you go by that stuff? SW: Yeah. MM: Wow. SW: Mama would let me miss school two times a year, one in the Springtime, one in the Fall. In the Spring time, it was to go get Spring medicine, and in the Fall time, it was to graze in the woods to pick Watson 21 ginseng and get medicine. We were doctored at home. Only thing we ever went to the doctor for was shots. Everything else was doctored at home. MM: So who prepared the folk medicines or did the— SW: My granddad. And then when he died, I got all his stuff. MM: Really. SW: I got his book where he had everything wrote down, what everything was good for, how you fix this— MM: Another article—With pictures-- Another chapter of the book. SW: He taught me how to dye cloth. But in the Springtime, my papaw used to laugh at us. He said, “It’s Spring. Woodie and the kids are going to start grazing.” ‘Cause we’d have poke salad and we’d eat dandelions, violets, and fiddle head ferns, and branch mustards, and branch lettuce, and all of that stuff. MM: Sanji, I think we need to write a book together. SW: [Laugh] MM: About your life. I’m not kidding. SW: Ah, that’s funny. MM: You know, before it gets lost forever. Like you said, you once told me you were raised that they did 100 years ago. SW: I was. MM: And I think that’s so amazing, and I think that's worth putting down. So do you notice a difference in people’s attitudes towards work now as compared to when you were growing up? SW: When we were raised, we were told you had to work for what you got, and you couldn’t have nothing unless you worked for it. People nowdays, the attitude is “Why work? I can get it handed to me. I can whine and complain—This is a sore spot with me. I can whine, complain, and I can live on the dole, get welfare or whatever, and I don’t have to work. We were raised, my family, you had to work. If you wanted it, you worked for it. You didn’t expect somebody to give you it. We worked hard, and we gave 110% and we had more than one job at a time. So, it’s changed a lot. There’s no work ethic like there used to be. People used to take pride in their job, and they don’t no more. Now it’s, “What can I do to get a raise? What can I do to get a bigger title behind my name? And they’re not worried about their job, their work, what they do. Okay? That make sense? MM: Yeah, thank you.
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Oral Histories of Western North Carolina

These interviews document the communities and culture of Western North Carolina. Topics include the building of the Fontana Dam, the history of WCU, stories from local veterans, integration of the...

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