Home in the Quarters

In early 1942, my daddy purchased a forty-acre farm with a four-room house in the Negro Quarters of Jackson County, Florida. It was so named because most of the folks who lived back there were poor, black farmers with a few acres of land or small, garden patches. There were five white families living in the area—Uncle Bo and Aunt Lois (Daddy’s baby sister and her family), Willie and Levett Hewett, Fred and Inez Williams, Mr. Junie McMillan and his family, and of course, my family.

Our house was just off a little, winding, pig-trail road. It was two miles to the nearest county maintained or graded road. The graded road ran about two miles to paved County Road 69, about three miles north of US 90 and Grand Ridge, Florida.

We lived in a small, wood-frame house with about 800 square feet of living space. It was built from heart of pine, twelve-inch lumber and had a tin roof. The house, the outbuildings and the four-foot picket fence that ran across the front had never been painted; they had naturally aged into a beautiful, grey-brown color. Along each side of the house and on the back was a three-foot, wire fence, what we calledfield fence, with one strand of barbed wire across the top.

A porch ran across the front, about twenty feet wide and ten feet deep. The house had a big living room with a radio in the left corner that was powered by a large, dry-cell battery. A grounding wire ran from the battery, through a hole in the wall and out to the grounding pole. In the middle of one wall was a large fireplace with a wood mantle over the hearth. Lace curtains covered the windows on each side of the fireplace. In front of the fireplace were three high-backed, rocking chairs, and against the back wall sat three matching straight chairs—all purchased from a traveling furniture truck at the same time. On the right side of the room was a double bed on an iron frame, covered with a quilt made by Mama and Grandma Bet. Each white pillowcase on the bed had an embroidered red rose. Mama’s Singer sewing machine sat near the front window and across from it was a dresser with a mirror on top.

From the living room, there were two doorways—the one to the right led to a bedroom with a window, and the one to the left ran through another bedroom and back to the kitchen.

The Quarters of East Jackson County in 1945

The kitchen stretched across the back of the house and was about fourteen feet deep and twenty feet across. A big wood stove stood in the far right corner with a window on each side, and a large, dining table sat in the middle of the room with the icebox in the far left corner. A door at the back of the kitchen led down to the backyard. Another door on the east side of the kitchen opened onto a back porch with no cover on top. By that door was the waterbench that held a bucket of drinking water and a washpan for cleaning