3

OverviewTranscribeVersionsHelp

Facsimile

Transcription

Status: Complete

-3-

so I stopped to talk with them. I asked for William Jackson whom I wanted
to see, and they told me he was under the car fixing the front spring.
From his position, he yelled up that he would be out as soon as he finished.

He emerged in a few minutes, and as he lived diagonally across the
road from where he was working, he invited me to the house to talk and visit.

When we arrived at the little weather-board quarter house, William
called his wife Corneal, and introduced us. Like William she was small in
stature, but. I found her pleasant and neatly dressed.

Inside the house she invited me to come in the kitchen where she was
busy making a house coat, adding that she had moved her sewing machine in
there to be near the warmth of the kitchen stove. She proudly showed me
the pattern she was copying from a catalog, and held up the bright material
for me to admire.

"This will be pretty when it's finished," she said. "You see it calls
for 16 gores in the skirt?"

William excused himself, after heating a bucket of water by submerging
an electric heater in the bucket for five minutes, and retired to the next
room to take a bath. Corneal explained that bathing was accomplished done in
a galvanized tub because they didn't have a bathroom.

While we were waiting for William to finish, I explained to Corneal
the reason for my visit, and asked her how she learned to sew so well. She
said: "My mother was a seamstress, and when I was small I started to sew.
Later on in life after I finished the grammar school I worked for Mr.
Adderly, who ran a tailoring establishment on North Florida Avenue in Lake-
land. There I learned how to tailor under his instructions, and now I
make nearly all the clothes for the neighbors here in the quarters, and

1115

Notes and Questions

Nobody has written a note for this page yet

Please sign in to write a note for this page