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 Dorothy Skinner and Virginia Skinner Harris Dorothy Skinner and Virginia Skinner Harris were sisters, born on a cotton farm in Lee County, South Carolina. Lee County, in the South Carolina sandhills region, was rich farming country. First settled in the 1840s by English and Scots-Irish settlers moving south from Virginia and north from the lowcountry, the county had a population that was, by 1920, over 65 percent African American. Before the Civil War the area had been dominated by large plantations, but after Reconstruction, partible inheritance patterns gradually fragmented the land. By 1920, landowning farmers with large holdings, like the Skinner sisters’ father, were rare. The average farm size was 46.7 acres, hardly large enough to support a family, and 78 percent of the county’s farmers were tenants. Three-quarters of those tenants were African American. Cotton and tobacco accounted for over 70 percent of the value of crops raised in the area, and the boll weevil’s impact was severe. The fifth and sixth children of a family with a long tradition of local leadership, the sisters paint an unusually detailed picture of daily life on an early-twentieth-century farm. With the help of several African American families who lived and worked on the farm, the Skinner family raised cotton for the market, as well as most of their livestock feed and food for the family’s use. The sisters describe a largely self-sufficient family that may have occasionally found itself strapped for cash during the lean years between the world wars but a family that was nonetheless much better off than most of its neighbors. Dorothy Skinner and Virginia Skinner Harris left the farm when they became adults and built successful careers, Dorothy as an independent insurance agent and Virginia as a hairdresser. Virginia was married briefly and had a daughter. The sisters lived together in Columbia, South Carolina, for most of their adult lives. Although Lee County is slightly outside the southern upcountry where the rest of these women lived, the story of the Skinner family’s life on the farm is very similar to other stories of prosperous families included in this volume. Dorothy Skinner and Virginia Skinner Harris 161 I met the Skinner sisters in 2001 when I spoke to a group of retirees who lived at Summit Hills Retirement Center in Spartanburg, South Carolina. My topic was rural life during the Depression, and at the end of my talk, a number of audience members shared stories of their own rural childhoods. One of them was Virginia Harris. After the group broke up and Virginia Harris disappeared, another resident, Frances Amidon, urged me to talk with the sisters, because she believed their memories would be so interesting to me. She was right. The interview was conducted in the ladies’ apartment on May 31, 2001. This particular interview is noteworthy because of the way each sister’s personality comes through. Dorothy Skinner’s mind was beginning to fail, but her memories of childhood on the farm were vivid and nostalgic. She was the idealist of the pair, and her sunny outlook comes through in nearly every line. By contrast, Virginia Harris was more realistic, perhaps because she had experienced more disillusioning life events. She remembered unhappy experiences as well as happy ones. Her memory was also sharper and clearer, and her approach to life was marked by a strong Christian faith. On September 27, 2001, in consultation with Miss Skinner, Mrs. Harris annotated and corrected the interview text, filling in blanks where the tape was inaudible. I made the corrections in the transcript.  virginia skinner harris: Yeah. Well, she’s older than I am [laughter], so she knew things before I came along. dorothy skinner: Well, I hardly know how to start. [laughs] I was born in Oswego, South Carolina. It is about halfway between Bishopville, South Carolina, and Sumter, South Carolina. I was born on January 19, 1914, during World War I. Those were hard days. I must have been the fifth [child in the family]. Let’s see. There was Ila, Ernestine, Emily . . . vh: Leslie, Dorothy, Virginia, Kathleen, and Jimmy. ds: There were eight [children in all]. I thought eight was enough. [laughter ] But we had a good father and mother. They supplied all of our needs and a lot of our wants, and at Christmas, it was so special. And our father just loved Christmas. He loved to see that we got the things that we...

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