Carolina Piedmont Country

3. Contemporary Social Groups

C H A P T E R Contemporary Social Groups Changes to the political economy of the Carolina Piedmont over the past century have had related repercussions on Upstate folk groups over that same period. As the region shifted to tenant farms interspersed with mill villages, town centers, and black neighborhoods, the groups inhabiting these places continued to interact with each other. Through this social interaction , group boundaries continued, maintained by stereotypical values and actions associated with each category. Then, as the area metamorphosed through the Depression and World War II, new groups such as northerners added their presence and perceptions to the intermingling of folk groups and beliefs. Today, these groups form part of the social background that supports and reinforces the traditional folklife of the Upstate. African Americans By the Depression, blacks in the Cotton Piedmont had endured a tremendous amount of economic disparity, political powerlessness, and social inequality. Many, as tenant farmers or sharecroppers, toiled long hours for very little annual yield. Others, ostracized from most mill jobs, served as "support staff (forexample, laundresses) for white villagers. Someworked as laborers in towns, while a few held professional positions as teachers, ministers, or merchants in black neighborhoods. These tasks virtually assured that African Americans remained continually in contact with Anglo Americans, albeit on a less than equal footing. As an anonymous WPA writer explained, "the social life of the Negro is generally like that of the whites, though color lines are pretty strictly adhered to." In Kent in the late 19405, a white informant offered John Mor33 3 34 Carolina Piedmont Country land this appraisal of blacks: "'I have nothing against them. They are human beings, like we are. But I don't want to have to eat with them or associate with them socially.'" Another Kent informant granted that blacks should be allowed to vote and to acquire an education, "'but they might as well realize right now that we will never permit them to mix socially with us.... Weare just notgoing to accept them as social equals' " [emphasis in original]. The obvious consequence of this social segregation, as John Edmunds indicated, was that "the black found himself in a caste system where his very blackness was a badge of derision." On the other hand, though, Louise Jones DuBose noted that in her era (the 1930$) "there are interracial loyalties and friendships that are characteristically southern in their nature," relationships that are "rarely understood except by Southerners." "We've always had real good relationships with the colored people that lived here," a landowner stated. One older woman succinctly expressed this traditional southern attitude of care tinted with condescension. When she was living in New York around World War II, she grew increasingly irritated with Yankees condemning her and all white southerners for their racism. She responded to one antagonist angrily: "'Well, I'm going to tell yousomething. I been in this town a long time, and I never have yet seen anybodyas black as my 'Uncle' Frank' We loved them a lot more than we did a lot of our relatives." Consequently, from antebellum times to the present, blacks and whites have been engaged in a complex relationship of mutual avoidance coupled with mutual dependency. From this intricate pattern of symbiotic interaction and social exclusion has evolved an equally interwoven network of folklife. The traditional interdependent relationship between blacks and whites began in childhood. For example, a WPAinterviewer described the youth of Ben Thomas, a retired white farmer from Edgefield County, South Carolina : "He . . . went fishing occasionally in Turkey Creek with the Negro boys on the place. 'I played and fought with . . . [them], ate corn bread, drank buttermilk, and grew,' "Thomas observed. A generation later, the same situation existed on tenant farms, James Edwards recalled: "When I wasgrowing up I played with black kids, went to their house and they came to my house—course you never did stay all night with each other. But you still played together. You know, you accepted each other, especially the kids out in the countryside. You knew that they did the same thing you did. They picked cotton like youdid." "I don't think there was an awful lot of difference after we came along," Martha Block agreed. On the other hand, though, racial boundaries only permitted a certain amount of acceptable interaction, even for children. Poignantly expressive Contemporary Social Groups 35 of this traditional segregation, Dale Garroway...