Betty Carter: Interview #2

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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Ritchie: Well, Betty, I wanted to backtrack just a bit this morning and talk about Hodding's political career in Louisiana.

Carter: Oh, that was hot stuff. Well, you see, they felt that they had to have somebody run for the legislature, an anti-Long, and so he ran. He really loved it, running. In those days they went out with sound trucks and they'd go through the town and announce that, either Long was coming or we'd hired our truck and the loudspeaker blares out that "Hodding Carter will be at the crossroads or at the drugstore or whatever it is at 6:00 p.m." Everyone turns out and you have little handbills, six by nine, pink/yellow dodgers that you hand out.

He went and he made the talks. He kept going back to Kentwood and I said, "Why do you keep going back to Kentwood?" He said, "It's 'cause they like me up there." It's ridiculous. Of course they did. They were an anti-Long community.

He went out to Pumpkin Center and he got there and he made his talk, and there were, I think, three or five people standing there. After he'd made his pitch this man came up to him, he had been standing there with his wife like Grant Wood types, and he said, "Now, son," he said, "I don't agree with a word you're saying but I'm going to come and vote for you because you had the courage to come out here." So he recognized his courage, and Hodding did get two votes in the town. It was a man and his wife, so that was nice.

But he was badly eliminated in the primaryóthey had an election but the primary was it. So he was badly eliminated in that. And it was the beginning ofóit was a big fight between Mr. Roosevelt and Huey Long. So Hodding was given all these work forms and you'd give that little slip to somebody and then they could go work in the mattress factory that the federal government had, the WPA or maybe it was the PWA, remember, the names changed in there. The mattress factoryóyou brought your old mattress and they took out all of your ticking, all of your insides, and cleaned it and put it in fresh ticking. That was a job that the government could give that didn't require materials, except for the ticking, I guess.

So, you were supposed to say to the man who you gave the little work form to that you expected him to vote for you. But Hodding couldn't do it. He said, "That poor devil, I know he's a Long man," but he couldn't do it, he'd just give him the slip, anyway. So I don't think Hodding was any asset to Mr. Roosevelt, either, although we were for Mr. Roosevelt. But he couldn't do it. He wasn't a politician.

Ritchie: Did he ever consider politics here in Mississippi?

Carter: No, oh, no. No, no, no, no. And Mississippi is so conservative, how could he have done it?

Of course, young Hodding came and broke all of that. He was very, very influential in getting the Democratic party in the state of Mississippi changed so it would be the Democratic party of the national party. And that was good. We worked all along for a two-party system, we thought that would help to be one of the ways that the state could change and go ahead, because nobody had to pay any attention to Mississippi. The Democrats because they had it, and the Republicans because they couldn't get it. That was why when Mr. [Jimmy] Carter came to Greenville it was the first time a presidential candidate had ever come to Greenville looking for the nomination. He didn't come as a candidate, he came looking. But it paid off and we knew it would pay off for Mississippi. But no, Hodding didn't run for anything.

Ritchie: Did you support candidates?

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we needed every vote. They said no, they couldn't bring the books to her but could she come to the courthouse. And I said, "Well, look, if I phone you and say she's on her way, can you march her right through?" So I said, "All right, now, how fast are your pains?" And she said, "Fifteen minutes, pretty close." And I said, "We're going. So you get ready, the minute this pain is over, we're going." And we went over and she voted. Her daughter became Hodding'sómy son Hodding's researcher in Washington, that little baby girl. Isn't that cute?

Ritchie: Oh, my.

Carter: Well, anyway, that's just a little side story.

Ritchie: Well, local elections would have brought in advertising revenue for the paper.

Carter: Oh, well, we did that. We were delighted to get the advertising revenue and did that. Then they passed, the legislature passed a law that said that you couldn't charge more than a certain amount for ads for candidates, political candidates, and John Gibson brought to Hodding's attention that this was a control of the press. We had to not accept political advertising after that. Because the right to control what you pay for an ad is a way of controlóand of course, it was those legislators that just didn't want to have to pay theó

Ritchie: Their money.

Carter: Yes. And so that was the end of the political advertising in the Delta Democrat-Times.

Ritchie: So it was no longer accepted.

Carter: Un-un. He was right, it was a philosophical point, there were very few philosophical points that we agreed with John on, but we agreed on that. And of course, I don't know any other paper in the world that agreed with that, it had to only be Mississippi. I don't know if it was every taken to the Supreme Court or not, but everyone accepted the advertising revenue that they were permitted to charge, but we didn't do it.

Ritchie: And that would have allowed the politicians to get more advertising for their money.

Carter: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Ritchie: They could spread their money.

Carter: That's right. So I don't know, it had two sides, I'm sure.

Ritchie: Was the paper ever accused of being controlled by a group or a faction?

Carter: No. If anybody'd said anything like that, they knew Hodding would go up and bip 'em in the chin.

Ritchie: And he did that on occasion?

Carter: Well, I don't know that he ever really did. No. But people knew that he was not just words, he would be action. Now, how they knew that, let me figure.

I don't know. The only bad time wasóthey were having the fundraiser for the building of the new church and they went up to Cottingham's Lodge up on Lake Washington, and the men all had plenty to drink, that's the way the Episcopal church raises money. The president of one of the banks, Conwell Sykes and Hodding just plain disagreed on every issue. So they disagreed on some issue at the bar at that party and Conwell said something and Hodding hit him. The Episcopal minister was very upset over that and of course

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Carter: Absolutely. Absolutely. But I'm trying to think of the political thing. He wrote one editorial that was marvelous about the legal eagles, the legal eagles that roost in the Weinberg Building. That was one building that had all the lawyers. And that was in the campaign when Frank Smith was running for Congress. A man named Oscar Wolf who was very conservative and he was running for Congress against Smith.

I said we didn't come out for candidates in the primaries but we certainly came out for Frank Smith in the primary. So maybe I have to take that back. Maybe it was in the local elections that we didn't takeóthat's probably what it was. We certainly fought for Frank Smith all the way down the line. And that editorial about legal eaglesóthe lawyers hated it because they sort of hated the idea that they were classified in a group, in a roost in the Weinberg Building.

Ritchie: Yesterday we talked a little bit about your involvement in the community with the Junior Auxiliary.

Carter: Oh, it wasn't just that. Within the first five years when we got back, maybe it has to beówell, anyway, I was president of the women of the church, I was president of the Carrie Stern PTA, then I was president of the junior high PTA, eventually the president of the senior high PTA, we moved to the country, I was president of the Trigg PTA, and I was president and organized the PTA Presidents' Council.

They organized something hereówell, they had it nationallyócalled the Altrusa Club, I was organizer and first president of the Altrusa Club. In the meantime, there was the Pilot Club, women, and they got me. So I was a Pilot, I never was president.

When I'd left Greenville for the war, I'd been a member of the Alice Bell Garden Club, which was a very good and very active garden club. But I hadn't been active in it, it was just a nice thing to have been invited to belong to. [I] came back and the Greenville Garden Club, which was the older club, invited me to membership because by then I had been a citizen for two years, with the war intervention, still two years. The Greenville Garden Club asked me to be a member and I thought, "Well, I'll just quietly not pick up my other membership."

But Mrs. Wetherbee announced they had saved my space, so I'm still a member of the Alice Bell Garden Club. And wrote their Arbor Day ceremony when I was supposed to plant Arbor Day trees. Mary Effie Parks and Ióshe was in charge of getting the trees, I was in charge of setting it up. There was no Arbor Day ceremony, so I wrote the Arbor Day ceremony, and we got a national honorary mention for the Arbor Day ceremony.

But I went on to be president of the Greenville Garden Club. And of course I was president of the Junior Auxiliary. Now all of this is taking place in about six years, maybe five.

Ritchie: When returning from the war?

Carter: Oh, from the war. So it was a period of really emphasizing that we were here. And the whole time working. The worst thing was that Hodding decidedówell, we both decided but he decided that we were going to go ahead and build out in the country. Well, I said, "Hodding, have we got time to do it?" Not asking have we got the money to do it. We didn't. But he said, yes, we would find the time. Well, that takes time, to think what you want to do.

Ritchie: To oversee it all.

Carter: Absolutely. So we did that, we actually broke ground. We built the little house, I designed the little house and the builder who built it for us, I think he had a plan, and I said, "How many square feet?" and he said a thousand. And I said, "Well, I just don't like what you've given us at all, it's a terrible plan. You have to go through the master bedroom, everybody has to go through to get to the bathroom, the one bathroom."

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black woman from Laurel, MississippióLeontine Price. And he'd had her come to sing at the high school auditorium, Bass Auditoriumówe weren't here for that.

Now he was having this luncheon in Jackson for Hodding who was a Pulitzer prize winner, therefore that was the proper thing to do and a lot of people turned out for it. And we ran intoówell, Rodney Defenbaugh came, his wife came to the luncheon, and that was the man who had been our advertising manager, who took over from me, and they had two little boys. And he was now the advertising manager for one of the Jackson papers. Grace said that she had this problem and that they were considering going into business for themselves in Grenada. And she couldn't decide what to do. And what should they do? And she said they just didn't have time to think, with the children and with all the problems, and I said, "Well, look, I'll take the children and we'll bring them with us to Greenville."

Out of Jackson, after the die was cast, and the children were coming, I telephoned the house and David Brown, then a reporter and later editor [Tom Karsell was editor then]óDavid Brown and Sue, his wife, were staying with our children over on Arnold Avenue while I went off on the trip. I phoned the house and I said, "Sue, everything okay?" And she said, "Yes, but the children have chicken pox." And I said to Grace, "It's all right with me but the children have chicken pox." She said, "Well, we'll just have to take a chance on the chicken pox because this is an important decision for the whole family."

Then we arrived at our house with the two children, in the house with the chicken pox. So there was confusion already. And as we drive up, there was an old Essex that I recognized. That Essex had appeared in Rockport, Maine, the first summer that we were in RockportóI guess it was the second summeróyou see, the dates are confusing. And I had telephoned from the country club where I was putting on the children's annual party and said to our maid, mother's maid, it has to be '46 because Mother had died by then and I had Sophie [Phillips] for that summeróand I said, "Sophie, is everything all right," because Ben Ames Williams and [his wife] Floss were coming to have dinner with us, maybe spend the night, I don't know. She said, "No'm, it isn't all right." And I said, "What's the matter?" She said, "Mr. Carter's got two people in there and he says they're staying at the house." And I said, "Well, do we know them?" She said, "No, ma'am, you don't know them." And I said, "Well, just add the places to the table and I'm on my way as soon as I can."

When I got home I found the guests were a young Dutch artist and her husband. They stayed six weeks. They had no place to go. We eventually had to buy a few pictures from them which we couldn't afford to do but we did. There was no other way that they could have left.

So here I arrived with Hodding, the house in confusion, and here is the Essex in front of the house. And Hodding was due at the Hebrew temple at the seven o'clock service where they were going to drink the Kaddish in his honor, where you go up in front and they take the goblet, et cetera. And I hadn't planned to go. Not but what I wanted to go but I thought I had enough to do to straighten. But when I saw that car, I knew I had to go, I had to have time to think.

We walked on in and welcomed them, and I said, "Look, I'm so glad"ówell, I was lying, but it was all right, another time where you build up people's egos, you cannot destroy people. So I said, "Well, it's so good to see you, but you can only stay one night, you can see this, and you're going to have to sleep on the sofa in Hodding's study. The two of you are going to have to sleep there." And I said, "But do that." And I said, "And I have to go to the Temple."

I went to the Temple with Hodding and that gave me time to sit and figure how I was going to take care of the chicken pox, my children, and the visiting children, and have breakfast and getówhat was her name? Cock von Ghent and [her husband] Arrie. They would reappear through the years. And I don't know what's happened to them. I think she did fairly well; she had some pictures in the Cleveland or Cincinnati Art Museum.

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Ritchie: So there was too much water for the cattle but not enough for rice?

Carter: Exactly. Because you have to put the water into the rice field when you need it. And that might not be when you got the rain.

Ritchie: Had rice ever been a crop here?

Carter: Not in this areaóacross the river in Arkansas, up by Stuttgart, that's one of the big rice areas. We have rice here now. And you'll see the rice fields as you drive, perhaps. You'll see fields that have very low ridges, plowed ridges, little levees, and that's so that the water can be flooded to that height, whatever it is.

Ritchie: Keep the water in.

Carter: Oh, yes, and you flood it when you need to. And then you have the catfish ponds that are rectangles, you'll see them.

Ritchie: And those are controlled areas where catfish are raised?

Carter: Oh, yes. And you have the peopleóon those places you'll frequently see that there's a little trailer near by. And it's really, it's gotten to be that the rustlers come and just steal your catfish. So you have to have somebody out there to protect your pond.

Ritchie: Security.

Carter: That's the point.

[End Tape 1, Side A; Begin Tape 1, Side B]

Ritchie: I'd like to talk a little bit about your involvement with the educational systemó

Carter: Always, always interested in the education. And you see, the PTA's were a way to get into the schools. I didn't look at it as the way to get into the schools, you went into the schools and you learned a lot from that. And then you learned a lot from the day nursery and you learned a lot fromóI don't know, I just always was interested in education as the way that you might build the community and people wouldóof course we learned about that, all the education in the world won't do it, you have to have the right heart back of it. Because look at the people that were running those horror chambers, a lot of those people were very highly educated. So education isn't going to do it. That's the tool. But the motivation has to be something else.

Ritchie: It's a combination. When you first arrived in Greenville, the schools would have beenó

Carter: They were completely segregated, of course. I remember taking an out-of-town guest over to the newest school, Webb, a black school, and we got over there, and in the hallway they were ringing the bell for the change of class. They hadn't put in an electrical system to ring the bell and this was after the war. I don't think that's important. It would probably be a lot better if all the schools just rang a hand bell That would be a reminder that you weren't just going to spend money on things you didn't have to spend money on. But the teachers couldn't get mimeographs and for multi-choice questions, horrible, how could you put out multi-choice questions?

And they needed a piano. They didn't have a piano. We went over to Carrie Stern, white school, they had seven pianos, everybody had given them their old pianoóa lot of them were not usable. But here they had

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And then there was a very black man from Bombay. I would take these people quite deliberately into the stores and downtown so that people came to see that you didn't have to be lily white or even sunburned white. You could be black and be dark.

But it was not until into the sixties that we began having black Africans. We went to South Africa in '59 on an exchange and were down there in Capetown for four months and made our way back via Cairo. We came back and after that, I guess, there would be an occasional black African that the State Department would send.

Now, frequently they would stay at a hotel, which came to accept them. But frequentlyóand I don't remember having any black Africans until later staying at the house. But as Hodding's eyes got worse and worse, and in '64 after he lost all reading visionóafter that it was simply easier for us to have the out-of-town persons stay at the house rather than me have to take them back in to the hotel at 10:30.

Ritchie: Right. Run back and forth.

Carter: That being out on the highway wasn't the mostóso it was easier for me to have the people in the house and we did that.

We had quite a nice group of young people, Hodding's age and older, who got very used to meeting and mingling with people of all types. It was good. I remember a man that came from Yugoslavia, and we took him out to the country club and one of the planters said, "I knew Hodding Carter was a Communist but I didn't know he'd be so brazen as to bring a Communist to the country club." But nothing came of it. And the others accepted it because by then they'd gotten used to what they were going to see with the Carters, I guess.

So I think that was about as educational a part of my relationship with the community as anything. And then arranging for these people to go into the schools to see what was going on and tell the schools what they did in their own country. Or to arrange for them to go to the Corps of Engineers and talk about the waterways and take them down and show them the levee and explain the alluvial plain to them.

Ritchie: So, in addition to establishing yourselves here in the community, Hodding made the community known.

Carter: Oh, very much, through his magazine articles and books. Part of what got him into trouble with the state, in addition to his local material, was that he would write, I think, a well-tempered piece about conditions in the stateóone such he did for one of the magazines, and the name that they put on it was "A New Wave of Terror Threatens the South," which was an inflammatory headline, and then had a picture of a burning cross and Ku Klux Klansmen. The article was about the founding of the Citizens' Council. It had nothing to do with the Klan. The Citizens' Councils were backed by the same mentality as the Klan but they didn't do the overt things. It was a jump that the magazine headline writer and picture man took which really got us into a hell of a lot of trouble.

Ritchie: Was that the time that the state legislature censured Hodding?

Carter: Yes, that's right. That's right. And then when Hodding made the talk at Brown, at the women's college at Brown Universityó

Ritchie: Pembroke.

Carter: Pembroke. And he gave, I'm sure, a very temperate [talk]. Hodding's theory was that he was interpreting the South for the North and the North for the South. That's really what we thought was our job. And really to open communication between people and get to know each other.

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But we knew them and we loved them. We paid them very little because we didn't have it, but also because we paid for their mistakes. So that was one way of looking at it.

Ritchie: I'm curious about one thing that you said earlier about education, that young Hodding went to Exeter.

Carter: Hodding had had an honorary degree from Bowdoin and from Harvard. He was up there at a lunch with a lot of college presidents, and he said, "What if you have a young man in your family and he seems to have unusual ability, do you think I should send him away to school and if so, where?" And they said, "Well, if he's getting the stimulation that he needs, we wouldn't send him off. But if he has to have more stimulation, then the best"óthey conferred, the president of Harvard, [James B.] Conant, and the president of somewhere else, and they said, "For a small school go to Deerfield, for a big school go to Exeter." Hodding decided that maybe we couldn't get him in to Deerfield, anyway, but we tried for Exeter and he went for his ninth and tenth grades.

Well, by then we were building the big house, we were in the little house, and that summer of '51, I guess it was, Hodding said did he have to go back to Exeter, that he might never be able to live in the big house, that he would have to go away to college, he might have to go away to make his living, and he'd like to be home. And his father said, "Well, if you stay home and go to the public school, and we see that you're not letting up, that's fine. But if you let up, you go back."

Well, he didn't let up; he came and he worked very hard. He was elected to everything that he could have been elected to and he was a speaker at the graduation and he was on the state high school debating team and he was on the state tennis teamóI think, I don't remember about that, but he played tennis and he was good. And he was senior class president which was the highest honor he could get, not knowing the rest of the student body. We felt that it was absolutely right that he came home.

Then Philip came along and we felt that he needed the stimulation and we sent him to Episcopal High and he stayed the wholeóI think four years, but three if not four.

Ritchie: And where is that located?

Carter: That's at Alexandria, Virginia. It's a good school. So he went there.

And then came Tommy's turn and for some reason my husband decided thatóI sound sort of critical, don't I? But anyway, Hodding as a child reading St. Nicholas had seen the ads for Culver and he thought that would be good for Tommy. It would be different from what the other boys had had and he didn't want any of them following in the footsteps of the other, each to do his own thing.

But any Carter to go to a military school, looking back on it in retrospectóhow could you put a child who came from a home where we would talk about so much, where he had so many window openings and experiences, into the discipline of such a place? He didn't like it but he stayed and graduated. So that was his experience with the thing and the whole time he wanted to be at homeóhe was not homesick or anything like that but he would have preferred to be at home. I don't know.

So, the children did go away in high school and when the integration thing came, Catherine, the oldest of the Carter children, Hodding's children, stayed all the way through high school here. Finn, however, went off, they sent her off to a prep school which had a lot of the dancing which she wanted. That was why she went. Then Hodding IVóthey sent him off to Lawrenceville. Hodding and Peggy got divorced and Margaret stayed with her mother and did not go off to schoolóthey moved from here and went to Baton Rouge and then to New Orleans and that child went to McGehee's and couldn't stand it, they were too cliquish. Then she went to Newman and liked it very much.

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So the City Council put Hodding on the school board to fill an unexpired term, knowing they could get rid of him at the end of that time. And the purpose of putting him on was to figure what they'd do with the Chinese children. He and a committee worked it out with the Chinese community leadership. If the Chineseówho were not permitted for so long to bring their wives inóif they had black wives the children were black Chinese; that was one category. If they had white wives their children were white Chinese. Then there were the Chinese who did have their wives with them and who had Chinese childrenóso they had three categories: the black Chinese, the white Chinese, and the Chinese Chinese. And they said that the black Chinese would go to the segregated black school and the white Chinese and the Chinese Chinese would go to the white school. And that's the way it was up to the time of integration and then all Chinese came into the public school system.

Ritchie: How did there happen to be a Chinese community here?

Carter: The Chinese came in, a lot of them were Cantonese who came in to sell to the Chinese who were working on the levee. The Chinese who were working on the levees either died or went back or disappeared. But the Cantonese remained and they have run little grocery stores, in the black community, primarily. There's one down on Broadway now, Bing's which is a Chinese family. That is a big supermarket that does very well and everybody, meaning the white communityóyou know, it's horrible how the habits of your childhoodóanyway, so everybody, meaning the white community people, goes down to Bing's. The Chinese local storesóas a whole those little stores are pretty tawdry things, selling to a very impoverished group in the population.

Ritchie: And you also mentioned that there was a considerable Irish community here?

Carter: They came in, I'm not exactly positive when, but they certainly were here in the days that the steamboats were important. They had the bars, the saloons, and I don't know what else that the Irishóbut they did and they became quite prominent in some ways. By the time we got here, there were several families that were knownóor into the power complex.

Ritchie: Was there an active Catholic church?

Carter: Definitely. There was a Catholic church and in the yellow fever epidemic of 1878, there was a tremendous death toll although everybody who could, left. And the man who was the clerk of the City CouncilóI think in those days it was aldermanicóin the minutes of the aldermanic board, he took a page and he put an inch-wide black ink border all the way around solid in memory of the members of the city government who died in the yellow fever epidemic of '78. He named the mayor and the three aldermen, and he said, "I alone remain," and he named the clerk.

Now, there were three ministers, there was the Episcopal church minister, the Presbyterian minister, and the Catholic minister. What other churches were here, I don't know, but these three were here and they didn't go, they stayed to take care of the sick. So I know that there was a Catholic church here in '78. They've had it as a history of that church, too, which the Washington County Historical Society has had its talk on but I don't know anything more about it.

Oh, I do know one other thing. The Catholic church in 1907, I think it was, not the church but an order came in here and established a school for black children, Sacred Heart School. They also were training priests. And they had nuns that they brought in, white nuns, different branches, maybe the women of their orderóand that was a good school, probably the best school for the blacks in this community up until integration.

Ritchie: So it stayed open untiló