Ep. 4: Rufus and Demalda Newsome and Newsome Community Farms, Greenville, MS

In this fourth episode, we talk with Chris’s parents Rufus and Demalda Newsome of Newsome Community Farms in Greenville, Mississippi at Christmas. While Rufus pulls seeds from cotton he talks about growing up at ten years old working in the cotton fields as a weed chopper, a hoe filer, and a water boy. While Demalda chops vegetables for the Christmas meal, she describes growing up harvesting fruits from neighborhood trees and beans from an overturned bean truck, and getting watermelons from the watermelon man. While she and Chris make tamales, we talk about how they’d always eat them with hot donuts in the Delta at Christmas, which brings us to talking about segregation and desegregation. She describes her advocacy and food sovereignty work with Newsome Community Farms, Community Food Security Coalition, and Food First. There’s a hidden track at the very end where Rufus opens his very first moringa pods (see the videos here) and the grandkids get to taste the seeds and the way they transform water, and we discuss seed maturity and storage, and the importance of eating good bacteria. 

SEED AND FOOD STORIES TOLD IN THIS EPISODE:

• Cotton
• Mustard and Turnip Greens
• Tamales
• Moringa 

MORE INFO FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Newsome Community Farms, by WhyHunger
• Demalda Newsome, Food First
• Food First
• An Introduction: Hot Tamales and the Mississippi Delta, Southern Foodways Alliance.
• The brutal murder of Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, by the History Channel.
• Fannie Lou Hamer founds the Freedom Farm Cooperative in the Mississippi Delta, by SNCC. 

 

ABOUT:

Seeds And Their People is a radio show where we feature seed stories told by the people who truly love them. Hosted by Owen Taylor of Truelove Seeds and Chris Bolden-Newsome of Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram’s Garden.

trueloveseeds.com/blogs/satpradio

 

FIND OWEN HERE:

Truelove Seeds

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FIND CHRIS HERE:

Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram’s Garden

 

THANKS TO:

• Rufus Newsome and Demalda Bolden Newsome
• Aunt Veronica
• Jala, Jacob, Amareion
• Sara Taylor

 

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT:

Rufus Newsome

Rufus Newsome:

Years ago as a boy. Um, the field wasn't very far away from where we live. We lived in Mississippi, Greenville Mississippi. We lived on white people's land. They were called the Dominic's. They were pretty decent folks also. But we went to other people fields to pick and chop cotton. I can remember as a small child smelling that fresh cotton smell and I crave the smell now. But this cotton doesn't smell the same way it did 50 years ago. It's different. Doesn't have a smell at all. But, progress goes on.

Owen Taylor:

Do you remember the first times you smelled cotton and what was that like and where were you? What were you doing?

Rufus Newsome:

I was in the fields when I was about 10 years old. At that time I was chopping because I think people had stopped picking cotton. That was combines picking cotton then, but we still needed to chop the weeds between the rows and there weren't a lot of herbicides used on that time. So we had to chop the weeds and I can remember seeing maybe 60 or 70 people chopping cotton. It seemed like those rows were a hundred feet long, hot. And so we're chopping and the aroma of the cotton, the smell just rises from the cotton and the smell is all around. Every so often you stop and pull some cotton and just sniff it up your nostrils and then you'd go back to work.

Owen Taylor:

What does it smell like? Can you describe it to someone who's never smelled it before?

Rufus Newsome:

It was fresh smell. I mean it was fresh. Uh, it smell like fresh air. Beside that, I can't describe it though. It's just really fresh. Like after a new rain when the sun comes out and clears up, everything smells so fresh. Remind me of the wash. My mom used to wash outside and hang the clothes up on the line and once the sheets, the white sheets dried that aroma and it would just, I mean it would just suffocate you.

Owen Taylor:

So what are you doing right now?

Rufus Newsome:

Right now I'm removing the seeds from, uh, some cotton that I picked from a field about two weeks ago on my way home from work. Uh, this is left over cotton in the field. So I went out and picked some, I'm sure the owner doesn't mind. And so what I'm doing now, I'm removing the seeds from the cotton itself. This is what our ancestors did. Everything was done by hand. They removed the seeds from the cotton. It was done by hand. And this is what I'm doing and I'm reminiscing of my ancestors, my great, great grandparents. As they sat there on the plantation, probably after noon, they've done all that picking. Now it's time to remove the seeds and so they're sitting there removing the seeds, talking and having a good time. It was very important that they remove the seeds because of course you know those seeds were planted the next year.

Owen Taylor:

Have you ever grown cotton at your house?

Rufus Newsome:

Oh yes we have. We, we grew cotton in Oklahoma. It was so beautiful. People would stop by older people, and say, you know what? That reminds me when I was a boy, when I used to pick cotton, I hadn't seen cotton in 50 years. And so we had planted a couple rows out in front of the house on the main street there, one of the main streets there in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was, it was a beautiful sight to see. That was about four feet tall. This is white and beautiful. That's why so many people stopped - they had never seen cotton up close before, just on television.

Rufus Newsome:

Well, you know, cotton been around for thousands of years. They Egyptians grew cotton and cotton is what kept the South alive. Major crop. Major crop cotton.

Owen Taylor:

Do you have a question? If so, get close to the mic?

Jala Newsome:

Did you ever have a brother or sister that died during slavery?

Rufus Newsome:

Well Jala, you know, I wasn't in slavery, but I'm sure we had relatives that died in slavery that we, we've never met.

Owen Taylor:

How old were you when you worked in the, in the fields chopping cotton?

Rufus Newsome:

I started in the field when I was about 10 years old. I started, uh, I think first I did do a little picking and then as I said, the combine, it was already developed, but I guess he was a poor farmer. He hadn't had it yet, but he got it later. And so we just basically chopped. I started off as a chopper chopping grass between the rows and then I was promoted to the water boy. That was a great promotion. All you did would carry water back and forth, uh, to, uh, the workers. And I did that so well I was promoted to a hoe filer. I filed hoes. Kept the hoes sharp and all. That's what we cut the weeds with. And I did that all the way up to high school. I earned most of all the money during the summer, uh, by working in the field cause Mama was working a job, she wasn't making that much. But I, I worked the field all summer and I made $13 a day for almost a month and a half. Imagine how much that was. So that helped bought my clothes along, my sisters and my brothers and food for the house also, I never regretted working so hard and rushing home and I couldn't wait to get home and get my money to my mother. You were paid in cash of course? Actually we made $15 an hour, but the driver took three.

Demalda Newsome:

$15 a day.

Rufus Newsome:

$15 a day. I'm sorry. Actually, we made $15 a day and the driver took three of it I guess for transportation and all. And I recall Mama, I would get up early in the morning about two, three o'clock because the truck left about five and mom would fix me my breakfast and fix me lunch also. She would make me baloney sandwiches and um, I think even she would put some, uh, teacakes in the bag/container. Teacakes were like homemade cookies and all. I mean they were just wonderful. They were like just a flat cookie, just delicious. We call them teacakes.

Owen Taylor:

Was it like the sugar cookies that Jala made the other day?

Rufus Newsome:

They weren't sugar, they didn't have sugar on it outside, but they were sweet though just from the inside.

Chris Bolden Newsome:

It's basically a sugar cookie recipe. Just thicker.

Rufus Newsome:

It's thicker. Yeah, it was a thicker, it was a thicker cookie. It was. It was a flat cake.

Owen Taylor:

So did, did other people in your family work in the same field? Did your brothers and sisters do the same work?

Rufus Newsome:

I remember my brothers, well my brothers had left already, but I do remember my sister, they tried it. Uh, the oldest sister. Um, of course you understand it was hot during that time, really hot. And I do recall my sisters going a few times, but they, they couldn't maintain. And then my baby sister Emma, she tried and she couldn't maintain because it was just so hot. Well there were several people that just couldn't do it. They couldn't work in the field. But for me, I worked, I had to work, I needed to work for my family's sake.

Jala Newsome:

Did you ever get tired of picking cotton for them?

Rufus Newsome:

I didn't pick cotton a whole long time. I didn't do it a long period of time because the cotton machine... Someone developed the cotton machine. The combine. Yeah.

Jala Newsome:

I thought they didn't care?

Rufus Newsome:

You thought who didn't care?

Jala Newsome:

The people that you had to pick cotton for.

Rufus Newsome:

Yes they cared, they want their crop in and they want things done cheap, they want things done as cheap as possible.

Chris Bolden Newsome:

That's why people use machines. Even though the machines hurt the earth.

Rufus Newsome:

One machine can do the work of 100 men or more.

Chris Bolden Newsome:

They wouldn't have pay to have paid 100 men or boys $13 a day.

Rufus Newsome:

For example, when I was watching the BBC, the history channel on BBC was talking about talking about a certain whale can eat up to like 200 pounds of a certain fish a day, but now the fishery can collect four to 5,000 tons of it in a day. And so they just, I mean what they're doing, they're taking more fish. They just taking too much.

Chris Bolden Newsome:

Pretty soon won't be none left.

Rufus Newsome:

There won't be any because they're taking too much. They're taking too much.

Jala Newsome:

Like in this article I read about penguins. Penguins are dying off because their parents are leaving them for food and then they're searching for fish and fishermen get too many fish and the adult penguins have to go farther and farther away from their children to get fish.

Rufus Newsome:

They're dying because when they leave predators come by and snatch their babies or if they don't return, they die from starvation unless they're adopted by another mother penguin.

Owen Taylor:

Can I ask you another question about when you were growing up? Um, how was your, what was your day to day life like? Like how did it compare to the life that your grandchildren live now? Like at home and in the community?

Rufus Newsome:

Because we had hardly, we only had enough to sustain ourselves. Um, of course we had a television, but of course we didn't have what the kids have now. And I can't compare because - I can't compare and say, well we didn't have games and they have the computer games now. Um, everything we did - basically we was outside a lot. We stayed outside a lot and we did a lot outside activities and all. Uh, we played outside a lot. We, we produced our own toys if we didn't have any - picking up a stick or something going around dragging on the ground, rolling a tire down the road, the gravel street there. That's the type of fun that we had. Uh, going fishing, not staying in the house all the time, watching video games or playing video games or etc. or things like that. We were, we were more active than kids are. Sure. I was more active than what my grandkids are now, even though my oldest grandson plays football, I was way more active then than the way he is right now because they have video games and he's on that a lot. And of course he's also preparing himself for when he go to college by watching other football players, by playing video games. And I'm not saying that it's not helpful. I think it is helpful, but we didn't have that. We learned, we basically, we learned by trial and error. We were out there, we learned to play sports just by doing it. We learned from my parents by watching what they were doing and they had us participate in it. It wasn't like, well I don't want to do it, you did because you had to do it. You had to do it.

Owen Taylor:

Um, what did, did you all have a, um, a kitchen garden at the house or a farm at the house. And what were the things that were the most important crops that you would grow at home?

Rufus Newsome:

Oh yeah, we did. We lived in the country. Matter of fact, the whole family lived in proximity of each other no more than 20-25 feet away. There's my grandmother in the middle, my uncle on the left, and my mother and I, we're on the right side. Grandmother lived in a shotgun house. If you're not familiar with a shotgun house, just what it says, one door in the front, one door in the back. So you go straight out. That's why they call them shotgun homes and all - just a little box with a front door and a back door. So my grandmother lived there and we lived in a regular house with two bedrooms. My mother, well, let me rephrase that: two rooms. We had a front room - that's where mother slept. There was a back room where all the kids slept. There was two beds in the back. Everybody slept together, boys and girls. We had a wash, a metal wash tub that we bathed probably I think maybe once a week, maybe once a week on the weekend. Um, girls, they washed first and then we will come in second. We didn't change the water, used the same water, bathed in it, then once it was finished we threw it out. And we didn't have an indoor toilet. We had what we call a slop pot. It was about pot about three feet tall, usually white and that's what we use for the indoor toilet. Once that thing is filled, you can't use it, so you have to go outside at one, two in the morning and all to down the outhouse, what we call it. And an outhouse was just a building, a small building with a hole dug about four - five foot deep. And the house was set over the hole and that's what we…that was our, our toilet, our outside toilet. And once that toilet was filled, we moved the house. The dirt that we recovered from that we, we use that and cover that back up and dig another hole and put the house over that hole. And so the process continued on: here, here, here, here.

Chris Bolden Newsome:

One of the ways they kept their soil fertile.

Rufus Newsome:

Yeah.

Jala Newsome:

I have question: Did any children, um, little babies in your house? I mean, little sisters or brothers that was babies - did they sleep in little drawers where you put clothes at?

Rufus Newsome:

Your uncle - Uncle Chris slept in a baby drawer, in a dresser drawer. He slept there as he was a baby. We didn't have dressers. We were too poor. We didn't have nothing like that. When we lived in the country, everything would just stored where ever in boxes and all. We didn't have a dresser with four or five drawers where you can store stuff. We didn't have that. We were too poor. And so we just managed the way we did. That was then.

Owen Taylor:

And so, and so what, what would be in the kitchen garden? What kinds of things would be grown outside?

Rufus Newsome:

Oh, the garden? Yeah, we got away from that. Yeah, we usually, okay, in the garden there'll be corn, okra, squash, mustard greens of course mustard greens. Turnips, huge turnip bottoms. Um, peas, beans, watermelons, sweet potatoes. And of course around the house you would have a mess of mustard greens right there, right available for you, right beside the house, the front door. And we'd just go out and pick them. When you needed some.

Owen Taylor:

Just like you had an Oklahoma. That's how you grew up. Always having a big patch of mustard greens.

Rufus Newsome:

Oh yeah, we always had a patch of mustard greens. Mustard green was a favorite green. Um, of course we ate other greens also, but it was the favorite green, but every black that I knew during that time, everybody loved mustard greens.

Chris Bolden Newsome:

Still do!

Rufus Newsome:

Oh yeah, still do.

Owen Taylor:

Where we live, people, people think of collard greens as the Southern greens. What do you have to say about that?

Rufus Newsome:

Oh, that's fine too. We've eaten collards also but I think I prefer the mustard myself though.

Chris Bolden Newsome:

We don't in Mississippi, we don't favor the collard in this part of the country. People don't favor the collard. I was in conversation with a woman in Kroger today. She said, I've never eaten any. She didn't know how to cook it. This is a grown woman older than me. And so I gave her a recipe how to cook it and she was afraid because we don't eat them. You go to the grocery store here, you go to the grocery in Mississippi, first top shelves are turnip greens and mustard greens and then collard greens on the bottom because it's the least picked. She didn't know how to pick it. It was too tough. But I also, I believe that there was a reason we ate turnip and mustard greens. The main ailment of enslaved Africans and then our descendants, their, their descendants. Um, has always been stomach ailments. It's always been infections to the stomach oftentimes, but just infections, you know, and particularly gut health has always been real important. You eat mustard greens, you know what I'm saying? Because traditionally black people got, even in daddy's lifetime, they got the worst of the food. They got the worst of the food, they got, they got, after white folks was finished and then had thrown it away. That's what you got to eat. When you used to get in a second rate food, spoiled over, molded... and I ain't talking about during slavery and time in the 60s, you know, you would get used to getting second rate food. Which is how many black people still live today. Many poor people all over the country still live today.

Rufus Newsome:

I remember the place that we live on the.. the Dominic place. We would shell peas for him. And once we completed that, he would send all his leftover fruit to us, like grapes, apples, pears, cherries. Of course, they had been picked over by everybody. And so they would send us a box full of boxes full of grapes that were all cracked open and juice running out. But hey, we saw that boy, Oh my goodness, that was a treasure, but they didn't know there was a treasure for us. They just getting rid of that mess. But it was a treasure for us because we didn't really get fresh fruits like that. We had no fruit trees around, no fruit trees at all, none. And we went out to pick blackberries. There weren't any blackberry bushes around where we live, so we had to go elsewhere and picked the blackberry. But that box of fruit was, was a treasure to us. We enjoyed it.

Owen Taylor:

What else would you pick in the neighborhood or in the wild?

Rufus Newsome:

All I can recall is we picked blackberries, but once we moved to the city, there were pears, there was peaches. The neighbor had several pear trees and during the summer all the families got together and harvested pears and made preserves and all.

Chris Bolden Newsome:

If you plant a fruit tree, a fruit tree, implies permanence. Really ownership. So you say y'all didn't have any fruit trees. That makes sense. You don't own your land, you didn't own your land, you did not put up fruit trees. Fruit trees was a sign that I live here now and I'm going to be here for a while.

Rufus Newsome:

Of course, we didn't stay there either long. I mean when I became of age we left. We left all that behind. Sure did. But uh, yeah, but during the fall of the year, we'd harvest our sweet potatoes and all, and we had a good huge crop. Of course, we all, we'd already harvested our corn and stuff like that. And I can't recall putting up any corn, but Mama did can peas and beans and I know my grandmother loved, uh, what is it Rumal that goes in the ground? Purple...beets, your grandmother, your great grandmother loved beets. Planted them all the time. Yeah. All the time.

Chris Bolden Newsome:

Great grandma? Ari?

Rufus Newsome:

Mm hm. She loved beats and she had this one collard plant for years and it just grew and grew and she'd just take the leaves off and one day I was, I was cutting the grass and I accidentally cut it down. It didn't come back. It didn't come back. It didn't come back. Sure didn't. And this is the reason why we lost our fingerprints also. Picking cotton and removing the seeds if you continue to do that.

Chris Bolden Newsome:

You don't have no fingerprints Daddy?

Rufus Newsome:

I have fingerprints. I'm saying our ancestors endured so much they had lost fingerprints they didn't have fingerprints because especially during that season there. But of course, when you stop, they were, they did return the prints they returned back to you. Yeah.

Chris Bolden Newsome:

Didn't know that. There's something, there's something kind of really deep and powerful about the idea that you lose your fingerprints picking through cotton, because, um, it's kind of also what happened in a real way. In this culture and in this century, fingerprints are used to identify people. So to say you lost your fingerprints, you know, also sounds like you've lost your identity.

Rufus Newsome:

I didn't think of it like that but yes you did. That's, that's what it was - during that period of time, we lost our identity. Yeah. Sure did.

Chris Bolden Newsome:

That's something powerful. We lost our fingerprints. I know that people will use, um, I asked you about that and now that the kids aren't in the room that people would use during slavery times. I know that our grandmothers would use cotton as an abortifacient in order to abort their pregnancies. You know, abort their babies. Yeah. And that if things got real....that was the last resort. Things were terrible, terrible, terrible. This was knowledge that women kept amongst themselves and never let out. So very rarely used, but for people who were tired of getting... Women who were tired of being constantly impregnated by force, especially by their white masters...course, you have to worry about the white men and black men if you were an enslaved woman. But you really had to worry about the white man who had absolute indiscriminate power over you. Did you know that? You never heard of cotton being associated with abortion?

Rufus Newsome:

Never. First time.

Chris Bolden Newsome:

Well, I'm very glad to, you know, to have my father in my life and I'm very proud to be able to do the work, um, that he did and that his father and his mothers did and their fathers and mothers did. Even if they did it. Um, you know, by force, you know, I'm really proud to be able to...that we did not like so many other black people in this country abandon the knowledge and the skills just because it came with some pain, you know? So I, I credit my being a Christian, being able to be able to understand that.

Rufus Newsome:

I told you about what Ms. Walker said. Mr. Walker's wife: "I'll never go back to the farm. I thought that was so rude of her to say.

Chris Bolden Newsom:

She said the farm, or to the South.

Rufus Newsome:

No, the farm. I'll never go back because they made me do all that. They made me do that. They made me do it.

Chris Bolden Newsome:

You have a lot of people for whom that was their only experience that they could never see it as something that they...

Rufus Newsome:

But it sustained them though. And they didn't see it like that. That tells me that that was some secret, or some hatred, some type of hatred that they have for the farm or the family - didn't want to work on it. "They made me do it". How else were you to survive if they didn't make you do it or force you, because apparently you didn't want to do it.

Chris Bolden Newsome:

You're talking about, at this point, family making, making the kids work.

Rufus Newsome:

Yeah. But everybody has to work. How was you going to eat if you didn't work?

Chris Bolden Newsome:

I think there's so much. It's we, we, we just as a people have lost so much of that work ethic. You know, that sense of ownership and then they can, people can blame the experience with the land, you know, as being the reason they don't want to do, you know, don't want to work, don't want to do anything outside especially, but you know, at the end of the day I don't, I don't, yeah, I don't understand why we don't have that.

Rufus Newsome:

I've come to the conclusion they just don't want to do anything. Why would they have to make you do it, why can't they just tell you "go ahead and get this done". You saw them do it. Why was so hard for you to do it? Because you didn't want to do it.

Chris Bolden Newsome:

What you said: "You got too much."

Rufus Newsome:

We had too much. Yeah. Too much.

Chris Bolden Newsome:

When you have too much, you start getting a sense of entitlement. e, but do you remember.

Demalda Newsome:

Demalda Newsome:

I think it had to be in the early or mid sixties when I was a little girl. There was a food truck, you know we had trucks coming through neighborhood all the time. The one bad thing was that in our neighborhoods they all had ditches. The streets were not like regular streets in other neighborhoods. So what ended up happening is one day a bean truck came down through the neighborhood and I guess it may have taken a wrong turn off of highway number one, but the next thing we knew, this huge truck had tipped over in the ditch. It was a huge truck. The truck was full of beans, green beans. Oh back then that was like a treat to have like fresh green beans. So they had been freshly picked. That word went all through the neighborhood. People sent their little babies and children. Everybody with a pillow case, like...we would fill them up, and get those beans. It was a white driver driving the truck and he was just screaming and then he just gave up cause it was so many people there just grabbing those beans off the ground even though they were grabbing sometimes dirt. It was just like a rush. And what I remember during that time it was like, it just seemed like everything was really dark and dingy and, and people were in a state of hunger at that time. Why I felt that way, I don't know. But I remember feeling like that was something from God that was so miraculous that this truck tipped over in our neighborhood and people had so many green beans to eat and back then, you know, we had to snap them and do all that. But nobody cared because you had food then. It was like you had fresh green beans. Guy couldn't call the police, he could call anybody because there were no cell phones back then. He just sat on the curb and just watched his whole truck get demolished. I mean just everything was taken off of those, I mean no green beans left. Not one. (Laughter).

Owen Taylor:

So did you grow up also shelling peas?

Demalda Newsome:

Yeah, I mean it was just a regular thing to do. Like if you wanted to eat, it was a way of keeping your food for the winter. It was so much work and it was so hot in Mississippi, there were no air conditions for a long time. People only had box fans. And the way I got cool was I would, I would go and hide in the closet and lay on the cold floor, cause it was just I, it was as if I wasn't even from Mississippi itself. Like I just could not take the heat. I would lay there for hours on that floor trying to cool off. And then air conditioners came along, you know before then everybody had screen doors and screen windows and they were up all night, all day. And you put the box fan in there. But it was just blowing hot air. So we were just blessed that when air conditioners did come out, we were one of the families that was able to get an air conditioner. But it was a lifesaver for me because I just knew I was not gonna make it.

Owen Taylor:

So your memory of shelling peas is just heat.

Demalda Newsome:

It was just so much heat. And it was, it was like you had to get it done, you had to get it done, you would get a big bowl and then you think, “Oh well I'm done”. You were never done. It was never ending. It just seemed like it went on and on and on, you know, but we were thankful for it in the winter time when mom would come out and, you know, take it out the freezer and, and, and make these peas that we had put up for the summer that we had shelled. It was me and my three sisters. We all shelled peas.

Owen Taylor:

Where'd the peas come from?

Demalda Newsome:

You know, it used to be people that come out, come, you know, down the street in cars...well, old fashioned trucks. They would come in these trucks and, and they, they'd scream, you know, watermelon, watermelon man. Or then they'd have peas and fresh greens and they would holler out in a song of sorts to let you know what they had that day and people would rush to the truck and purchase it. That was the way that they did it.

Owen Taylor:

Do you remember at all any of the songs they might sing?

Demalda Newsome:

I just remember the one, the watermelon man, but I can't sing so I don't wanna embarrass myself, but he would say, "watermelon, watermelon man whoa, watermelon, watermelon man." You know, every kid in the neighborhood loved watermelon. So we'd all be begging our mom to "please mom get us watermelon, get us a watermelon." But they would also, like I said, they'd sell peas and things, but always, there was a neighbor that grew a lot of things like that and they would share with the next door neighbors. You know, some of their bounty that they would, that they would get, but I don't know. It had become to some people a source of shame to get garden-raised food. They didn't want people to know because it made it seem like they were very poor, if they were having to grow a garden to eat, which I as a child never understood that and I'm thinking "ah you know, these vegetables look great", but some people felt it was, you know, shameful do to grow a garden or to eat from a garden. But that was a lifesaver for most people. I remember too in the summers, the way I would eat, it would be a group of girls and we, you know, we were on our own little posse so we, we gathered together in the morning in one, you know, special location and then we'd wait to the - to whomever house that we were gonna go to - that they had gone to work. And so, we knew where every peach, plum tree, pear tree, we knew where every one of them were in our neighborhood. And we'd wait till they go to work and raid the trees. I remember just sitting, you know, somewhere in the empty vacant lot and laying on the ground and just eating peaches or plums and you know, the juice dripping all over our faces and arms, you know. I just remember that. And then a rumor went out and I don't know if it was ever true but it became really bad cause a lot of people when they got home their branches would be broken down. And that wasn't our group of people. Apparently, you know, some other group had done that, but we would tried to be (FRONT DOOR) really careful when we would go in to get the peaches and plums and things. But, um, a rumor had gone out that this woman (FRONT DOOR) had sprayed her tree and some child had gone while the people were gone and eaten the fruit and died and that, that kind of put an end to what we were doing. Cause after that our parents said, you all are probably going around eating. You know, cause we never brought our loot of fruit home. We just ate it in you know, an empty lot or something that was in the neighborhood. Like I said, that was the end of it.

I just remember relocating back here to Mississippi and the first thing I wanted to find was where are those neighborhood trees that were in the front yards and, and backyards? And they were all gone and I couldn't understand it. I remember going to a, um, farm service agent, an NRCS person too and asking them like what happened to all the fruit trees. This place was abundant with fruit trees, you know, pomegranates, big, huge pomegranates and all those things that when I was in Oklahoma you paid a lot of money for, and these were just on trees here, but the, the trees were all gone. And what I was told that that some, some um, some kind of virus had hit back in the 90s that took out a lot of the fruit trees and they just never, people never put them back cause the people that would have owned it would've been great grandparents. And so I, I guess the, the ones that were still here didn't find that, you know, as valuable. Or they didn't think that people would eat off those, still eat off the trees. I don't know, but I know, I was very disappointed. And one of the things I'd like to do is to kind of maybe perhaps look into some sorts of funding to bring back those neighborhood fruit trees and teach children that they're edible. You can eat directly from the tree. (PHONE DING) We didn't wash them off or anything. Now I'm not saying don't wash your stuff off, but I'm saying as a kid we did not wash our stuff off. We were so happy to get those plums and pears and none of us got sick.

Chris Bolden Newsome:

I think that's why you all didn't get sick, because you ate foods with all the microbes and all the good bacteria on it. Now they understand, white man's science proves, there are more probiotics for your gut health contained in the core of an apple than eating yogurt. So when you eat apple, the skin and the core and that sort of thing, you get all of that good bacteria in a way that you just would never get it.

Demalda Newsome:

Now we would, you know, back then, we weren't scared of worms. We'd like eat around and try to pull the worm out with our finger or something and just eat the part where the worm wasn't. You know, we, we didn't freak out about seeing a worm in something, you know, you just ate around it and you know, just kept eating. And I remember eating figs, figs have so many ants in it and we didn't care about eating the ant back then. You know, it just cause the, the fig is so good. We were just like, Oh my God, it's so sweet. Cause back then parents didn't let you have a lot of sweet stuff. You know, it was something, this new disease that it was only talked about in whispers and they thought for sure that that's what caused people to have this disease. And they called it "sugar diabetes" or no they would say "sugar". That person has sugar. But it was said in a whisper like: "Oh yeah they got sugar. Shh don't talk about it". And they looked at it as a cancer almost and that's the way they talked about it. And then back then we actually got worms, you know, like real ones, you know, you'd go to the bathroom when you found a worm coming out of you. And I mean, you know, as a kid you're freaking out because something has come out your body that wasn't like the regular stuff that comes out your body. Now that freaked us out. We didn't care about eating worms and stuff but you didn't want one coming out of you. Sorry, but that's, you know, that's just one of those stories that people don't know about that back then. Now I never hear of any kids having worms, you know? So apparently maybe the immunizations or something else. I don't know what they're doing.

Chris Bolden Newsome:

Kid's don't get worms now?

Demalda Newsome:

They don't get worms anymore. Most young parents have never heard of what I'm telling you today that you could actually go to the restroom with a stomachache and then you, then you give birth to a worm. The longest damn worm you've ever seen.

Chris Bolden Newsome:

Mommy they had worms when I was a kid! We had worms!

Demalda Newsome:

I know you all were the last generation to have worms and it was, it was, it was sort of an anomaly that you all had them.

Chris Bolden Newsome:

No.

Demalda Newsome:

Yes, it was the doctor...they have not really been treating a lot of children for worms.

Chris Bolden Newsome:

But you see, this is why we kept mustard greens in our garden mustard and turnip greens in our gardens. They were fumigants. They were fumigants. Most of our ailments were stomach ailments. I didn't know people didn't get worms anymore. I had no idea.

Demalda Newsome:

But the worms you all had got were pinworms that come down at night. These were not the worms that you, you sat on the toilet and just gave birth to. I mean that was different. And I mean now thank God nobody has to birth a worm anymore.

Chris Bolden Newsome:

Well I don't know about that cause I think that probably not, I don't know if I would thank God for it because not worms means that there's something not in the environment. It's good. I mean I don't want to have worms again ever, but what does it mean that we in such a sterile environment and then we also don't have near as many birds. You know what I mean?

Demalda Newsome:

Though when you're a little kid and you're there screaming, somebody got to pull that worm out. Yeah. That's not cool.

Owen Taylor:

So switching gears a little bit. (Laughter) We really went down a wormhole.

Chris Bolden Newsome:

I think it's important to talk about those old ailments though, baby. Particularly for people especially like in the North and stuff where there's just so little like connection to...people didn't take care of...like, I don't even know, did you go to the doctor if you had worms?

Demalda Newsome:

No, everything got taken care of at home. Back then, you didn't go to a doctor they gave you, um, what, what was that one? Turpentine. Turpentine either killed you or healed you. I mean that's what it was. You had a little bit of it.

Chris Bolden Newsome:

But there's other stuff we took for worms, I have it written down on that list of Mississippi cures.

Demalda Newsome (15:55):

I just remember if you had to get turpentine, you were dealing with something real serious, it was like the mother of getting rid of anything that was serious. Like if turpentine couldn't do it then you are going to die anyway.

Owen Taylor:

Do you remember other home remedies?

Demalda Newsome:

Now see my grandma was the kind of person that she didn't do a whole lot of, you know, old fashioned remedies. Well she did things like when I had a baby, you know, um, and I was having real bad cramps. And then, um, I went to take my shower and when I got back and I laid down in the bed and I didn't have any more severe cramps and, and she asked me, "are you still cramping?" I said, "no". And what I found out she had done was she had put a sharp axe between the mattress and the um, you know, what do you call it? The board. And it cut off the, the sharp cramps that I was having. You know, unbeknown to me, I didn't know why they just stopped. It was miraculous. Thank you God. I was just so glad they stopped cause they were, you know, real extreme and I guess that's a uterus, you know, contracted and everything trying to get back into shape. But I know things like that. She didn't really do a whole lot of things like um, my husband's mom where she would use fat back and put it on open wounds and things like that. I found that really shocking. That was different than I had grown up with. I think mine was mostly... We got medication, my grandma would buy Castoria if you needed it or you know, um, whatever, constipation, whatever, things like that. Or we had Creomulsion and it had the things in it. It had those old kinds of medicines in it. Um, and we never took Father John because it had castor oil in it. We took Castoria, which would taste better. But my husband, they were taking Father John and they were taking a big dose of Cod liver oil.

Chris Bolden Newsome:

But you all took castor oil too, you gotta remember, especially like nowadays castor oil is considered a home remedy. And it wasn't medicine.

Demalda Newsome:

Well we didn't do caster oil. Mama didn't do it.

Chris Bolden Newsome:

Why'd you all give us castor oil? You didn't take castor oil?

Demalda Newsome:

I only remember taking it like one time and I don't know why mom did it that one time. It was not a continuum.

Chris Bolden Newsome:

Why did y'all give it to us?

Demalda Newsome:

Um, because your dad had used it. So I was like, okay, well you know, he grew up with that and he felt like that was something you wanted to do. He said it really helps the kids get through the flu, the cold season, all of that. And you've got that during cold and flu season. You got that big dose of warm castor oil with a little bit of sugar in it. And then you just took the biggest spoonful you could. It was horrible tasting, but the kids, they really didn't get a lot of colds and things.

Chris Bolden Newsome:

I think it protects you for old age too.

Demalda Newsome:

Perhaps. So since you had it while you were young.

Owen Taylor:

So we're sitting here preparing for big Christmas meal. I'm wondering if you remember the like quintessential, like most important dishes from this area, from your grandparents' generation that have made maybe some that made it to the future, maybe something that didn't.

Demalda Newsome:

Well, one of the ones that didn't and I tried to bring it back and, and I did at Thanksgiving was Ambrosia. Ambrosia was one of the ones that, and I don't, I'm, I'm pretty sure every household didn't do it. Um, for I guess I grew up mostly what was black middle class. And so Ambrosia is this really delicious, um, concoction of fruit with coconuts, oranges in it. We use Mandarin oranges. Um, this year I use the seedless orange, but not the Halo oranges. It was another type of orange. I used that with the coconut and pineapples. And, um, and we had nuts and you put, um, I'm thinking that we put cranberry, we put cherries in it. And so you blend all of this together. But that's one of the ones that, um, if you go and you look at old Southern cookbooks is still there. And the giblet gravy, um, is something that's a must have at Christmas and Thanksgiving. But you usually do a goose - upper middle class again - you do a goose along with the turkey for, for Christmas and um, a duck and turkey or Thanksgiving. Yes. We always had like two different meats.

Owen Taylor:

Besides the meats. You know, I know that Southern peas are super important. Crowder peas, butter beans. What are like the vegetable dishes, whether they have meat in them or not. What are the most important vegetables of this region?

Demalda Newsome:

Of course, all of the greens, you know, this, uh, collard greens, mustard greens, turnip greens, and not the curly ones, you know, just a straight leaf, uh, mustard greens. My, my mom never really did collard greens that much. And Rufus, he didn't, he didn't do collard greens. He didn't like them. I don't know. So we've had a time trying to, you know, um, fix them in a way that, that he would eat them also. So what I've come up with now that people eat them is with, I blend them with cabbage, so I stir fried them with cabbage and all that. What has changed is I do more stir frying of greens than ours - they were just boiled with lots of meat and lots of um, you know, fat back and uh, salt pork and things like that. Um, and that's how the greens were made. We had sweet potatoes, you know, they were candied sweet potatoes is what we called it. And peas. Now these were not things that... peas were not really things that we ate at the holiday time. We did mostly greens and dressing and things like that.

Owen Taylor:

Hmm. So not the, not the butter beans either.

Demalda Newsome:

No, because remember they weren't in season. Those were things you, you kept in your freezer for hard times. You didn't, it wasn't brought out during celebratory times, it was just kind of brought out during hard times, getting through the winter.

Making Tamales

Chris Bolden Newsome:

Making tamales with my mama at Christmas. We eat tamales in the Mississippi Delta. They were introduced by Mexican immigrants in the 30s and 40s. They were brought up here to work and we adapted and adopted their food ways because we Africans, we liked spicy food anyway. It was a perfect mix.

Demalda Newsome:

Some things have changed. I'm finding more people uh, African-Americans that can't tolerate spicy foods and yeah, I found that real strange cause when I was growing up we, we enjoyed tamales and a little spice and Tabasco. Now people like "I don't want tabasco", you know.

Chris Bolden Newsome:

It goes hand in hand with deterioration of a lot of black culture. We can't eat our foods anymore.

Demalda Newsome:

I know like our trip to Africa, it was so surprising. I don't know why I found it surprising that the food was really spicy. You know, I didn't think of African food as being that spicy.

Aunt Veronica:

You go to Nigeria, your food be burning up.

Demalda Newsome:

I mean, yeah, but the, the African food here has been, I don't know, it's been kind of toned down for, for Americans, but in Africa you get the full African flavor and the spiciness, like it's really spicy,

Chris Bolden Newsome:

You grew up eating hot food. Black people, to my knowledge, I always ate hot food everywhere. There was one thing that distinguished us. One thing was common to us, no matter where I went, Negros in Omaha or in Oklahoma, well I don't know about Oklahoma, well, a that's a different breed of Black. They don't really eat hot food. Shoot, they don't really eat no hot food. I don't know what to say about that.

Demalda Newsome:

But I always thought, you know, coming up and especially being in my young twenties that, that, um, that was just something almost sacred to black people is that we, we, we could eat spicy foods, but now I'm finding more and more people like, "Oh, like this hot"

Chris Bolden Newsome:

Even white people in the South ate spicier food than white people in the North. I expected when I went to the North... Black people up there, you know, they can't take nothing. Black pepper to them is hot.

Demalda Newsome:

Yeah. I used just a tiny bit of cayenne when I, when I move