DeKalb, Texas: Growing up in the Bethlehem Community

This podcast episode features a heartwarming conversation between Bennye and her daughter, Keisha, reminiscing about the mother's upbringing in De Kalb, Texas, and the surrounding Bethlehem community.  Bennye shares vivid memories of her small-town life, detailing the town's demographic composition, local businesses, community dynamics, and racial segregation experiences.  She contrasts the past with the present, noting the decline in population and communal activities.  The discussion also covers personal anecdotes about family, cultural practices, and the impact of their community's socio-economic changes over time.  The episode paints a detailed picture of life in a rural American town from the past to its present-day challenges while highlighting the strength and resilience of community bonds.

00:00 Welcome Back and Catching Up
00:47 Celebrating Milestones and Mother's Day
01:21 A Deep Dive into DeKalb, Texas: Hometown Stories
03:42 Life in De Kalb: Stores, Services, and Segregation
08:39 Community Dynamics and Racial Divides
11:23 Navigating Social Norms and Segregation in Retail
14:29 Exploring Surrounding Communities and Their Connection to DeKalb
16:00 Bethlehem: The Community That Raised Me
18:09 The Heart of Community: Church and Fellowship
18:50 The Tradition of Hymns and Testimonies
19:37 Exploring Gender Roles in Church Leadership
20:12 Musical Expressions and Lost Traditions
20:38 Family Dynamics and Church Attendance
21:51 Community Cooking and Sharing Meals
24:11 The Essence of a Close-Knit Community
28:36 Addressing Crime and Mental Health in the Community
32:00 The Decline of Bethlehem and Reflections on Community Resilience
34:16 Concluding Thoughts on Hope and Community Survival

Transcript

Almost 80 Episode 2

Keisha: Hey, Ma.

Bennye: Hey

Keisha:  How are you?

I'm doing good. I'm doing good. It's about time for us to do another,

Keisha: Honey, it's been, it's been time.

Bennye: Yeah, it has. Some people have been asking me, what are you doing? When is the next one coming? So,

Keisha: we're excited to be back. We've had a couple things happen since we last did this. You had a birthday.

Bennye: oh, I did.

Keisha: You did. So you're actually almost 80 now.

Bennye: Are you saying that I wasn't before? Well, I'm closer.

Keisha: Closer. As close as you'll get without being 80.

Bennye: without being there. I'm 79.

Keisha: Yes, you are. So happy belated birthday.

Bennye: Thank you.

Keisha: Yeah, and we have Mother's Day. Yep. It's been good.

Bennye: Yeah, God is good.

Keisha: So, what are we talking about today?

Bennye: Well, you know what I was thinking about before I really delve into a lot of my story? I thought I should place everybody where I was, where I grew up, 

Keisha: Okay. 

Bennye: and I should talk about, uh, DeKalb, Texas.

Keisha: Mm hmm.

Bennye: just where I grew up, 

Keisha: Mm hmm. 

Bennye: specifically, more specifically, in the Bethlehem community. So, if you were traveling from Dallas, going, like you were going to Texarkana on I 30.

Keisha: hmm.  Going east from Dallas

Bennye:  Yeah, East. Like you're gonna go on to Arkansas or Little Rock or somewhere. Then, uh, about a hundred, a little better than a hundred miles down the road, you would come up on an exit that said 259. So you would take 259 and go north. And you would stay on 259 for, say, uh, 16 or 17 miles. And you would come into a town called DeKalb.

Keisha: DeKalb, Texas.

Bennye: yeah.

The population sign always said, I don't know, 1600, 1612, something like that. But it never changed. I don't care how many people died or were born. And I think it probably still says something like that. Even though, you know, the population has really diminished

Keisha: Mm hmm.

Bennye: But, uh…

Keisha: you're describing to me a town that sounds like it is off the beaten path. Is that safe to say?

Bennye: it is off the beaten path. Yeah. It has a place of its own, but we had quite a few things going on in DeKalb, you know, DeKalb sustained all the communities that were around it. 

Keisha:   Um hmmm

Bennye:  There were quite a few Black communities. There were a couple of white communities surrounding, uh, DeKalb, but most of the communities around DeKalb were Black

Keisha: So, when you say surrounding, I mean, I'm getting this idea of like, uh. You know, right now I think of, like, people who live in cities, and then they have suburbs around them. And people who live in those suburbs don't necessarily have to go to the city, but they can if they want to. Is that kind of what you mean by communities around DeKalb?

Bennye: Uh, when I say communities, we were not self-sufficient. We had to go into town in order to survive, because that's where we bought our groceries. That's where everything happened.

Keisha: Got it. Okay.

Bennye:  In DeKalb. So we were, we were considered communities.

Keisha: So what did DeKalb have that, that was kind of the center of this universe, basically, right? It sounds like, what, what did, what could you find in DeKalb?

Bennye: in DeKalb, when I grew up, we had four or five grocery stores. We had a five and ten that we call Ben Franklin. That was an old, you know, that was an old franchise or something. I think in various places, Ben Franklin.  I remember seeing it.

Keisha:  A five and ten is like, uh, a Woolworths? Or…

Bennye: Yeah, kind of like a Woolworth, you know, or today you would say, what's, what's the store you call it?

Um, oh, gosh, I can't even think, well, Dollar Store.

Keisha: Ah,

Bennye: kind of like Dollar Store.

Keisha: okay.

Bennye: Something like that. we have one movie theater. But we really didn't go to the movie theater. We went only when our school went up there to see something that was supposed to be educational about the history of Texas or something.

And we had to sit in the balcony. We were not allowed to sit on the 1st floor. We had a feed store. Which, because a lot of the people were farmers and all this, so they would go there and get all their seeds and everything. And in that same little place was an icehouse because for a long time, before we had electricity, they would bring blocks of ice down and that's where they made the ice in this icehouse.

And also at this ice house was a place where they could butcher cows and things and, you know, put it into steaks and cut it up and. And I think they would keep it in cold storage for some people, and you could just go there and get it. Your own stuff. Yeah.

Keisha:   Interesting!  So if you had ….did y'all have cows and things like that? 

Bennye: Yeah, we had cows and pigs

Keisha: Okay. And did you kill them yourself or did you bring them up to the butcher?

Bennye: we killed them ourselves. 

Keisha: So you butchered your own animals

Bennye: yes,

Keisha: and did you ever personally partake in such activity?

Bennye: I did not.

Keisha: I could not see it. That's why I asked you the question. I was like, I can never see my mother doing this.

Bennye:   No, I, I would watch and then sometimes when, uh, you know, when it got down to the chitlins and mama would say, come and help me clean these. I just, I could hardly do it. And I could never eat them. It was just,

Keisha:  which is why to this day you won't eat ‘em.

Bennye: Today I will not eat them. I will not clean them. I will not cook them. I don't want to smell them.  Okay. Let's say it like that.

Keisha: But did she cook chitlins?

Bennye: Yeah. She cooked chitlins. We used every inch of Every piece of that hog. even lights and some of the inner parts of it, and they

Keisha:  What is a light? Lights.

Bennye: I don't know. It's kind of like with the, it's kind of like liver and, and I don't know, some, some inner organs

Keisha: Some organs Okay.

Bennye: yeah, and they would cut it up and put onions and season it and carry on.

I would just look at it. I didn't, I didn't do 

Keisha: said, I'm not eating that.

Bennye: Yeah, I couldn't eat

Keisha: I'd rather be hungry at this moment. 

Bennye: Right. And we had two or three gas stations, service stations. We had two, uh, drug stores, I think. And inside of there, they had fountains, soda fountains, you know, where white folk could go and sit and order, you know, soda drinks and stuff.

But we couldn't go there and order anything. We could just, basically, we just got drugs out of there, you know.

Keisha: Mm hmm. But they would sell you medicine?

Bennye: Yeah, medicine. They’d sell us medicine.

Keisha: and did you need a prescription from a doctor for most of this medicine, or did they just have stuff that you could buy?

Bennye:  Yeah, for most, for most of it. But you know what? Sometimes you could just go there and ask the pharmacy. You could tell the pharmacy what your symptoms were and they would give you medicine.

Keisha:  and they would give you medicine

Bennye: uh huh. Yeah, I remember

Keisha: interesting. That's interesting. Yup.

Bennye: we didn't always go to the doctor, you know,

Keisha:  but you had some

Bennye: we, we always had like, we always had at least one.

Most times we had two doctors. And I remember the first doctor, Dr. Crew, that I remember, he made house calls.

Keisha: um hmm.

Bennye: Yeah, he would go out and make house calls

Keisha: he would drive out. I guess he had a car

Bennye: Yeah, he had a car,

Keisha:  so he would drive out to the house.

Bennye:  and he would get out with his black bag, or some kind of bag, and come inside, and whoever was sick, we would get them ready, get them all cleaned up and everything, and we'd have a hot pan of water for him, and everything, so that he could tend to them.

And he was really a nice man, and I think a good doctor, you know, and they were always on call.

Keisha: Right, which I can't even imagine, right? So this, this life of being a doctor in a small town,

Bennye: You could drive up to their house. And because I remember one Sunday morning, I had a ringing in my ear and daddy got somebody to take me up there. We went to his house and he, he gave me some kind of drops or something for my ear and told me to go back and, you know, and I think it did help, you know, and it might…

Keisha: at least it felt like it did.

Bennye: I'm saying maybe I thought it was helping because we had gotten in the car and gone up there and he had put this stuff in there.  You know, they say medicine is not always, 

Keisha: It's not always the medicine. 

Bennye: it's not always the medicine. 

Keisha: Sometimes it's psychological.  Yes, yes, yes.

Bennye:  So we had like 3 cafes or restaurants, but we couldn't go inside and eat. Okay. We 

Keisha: could you order food and get it out the back?

Bennye: you could go to the back and order a hamburger or something. I don't remember anybody ordering like plates of food or anything. The only thing I remember that we would order every now and then was a hamburger. Plus we didn't really have money to do that.

Keisha: Yeah. I was about to say that that costs cash, right?

Bennye: Yeah. So we didn't really have that.

Keisha: Yup. Got it.

Bennye: And in, in, in town, in the town of DeKalb, there were five Black churches. there were two Baptist churches, a Methodist church, a Church of God in Christ, and a Church of Christ.  Right in DeKalb.

And then there was one, uh, First Baptist church, which was white. And for the longest, we only had that one white church there, but then a Methodist church came, so they had two, two, two white churches there.

Keisha: Interesting. Were they physically bigger than the black churches?

Bennye: yes, they were bigger. They had a more of a presence like in the center of the town, you know

Keisha: Yeah.

Bennye: We had two or three furniture stores where you could go in and buy furniture and, you know, they would let you have furniture, and you pay them out a little bit along or whatever on credit. Most of the stores would give you credit.  And like in the grocery stores, sometimes they would have different prices on things.  They would give you credit and when you go back to try to pay it off, they would say it was something else, like more than what you thought it was, because they had registered something else, you know.

So….The space between the time that you bought them and the time that you paid was really inconsistent and slippery.

Keisha: Slippery.

Bennye: Slippery, yes.

Keisha: There's a saying that I learned from, I think, you and dad, that you can't beat the man and his pen.

Bennye: Right, right.

Keisha: That's the whole idea of it.

Bennye: That's the whole idea of it.

Keisha: yeah,

Bennye: And, and you know, when we would really use that with when we would be playing cards.

Keisha: Well, that too, because you know, people will cheat you.  

Bennye: And whoever was keeping this, 

Keisha:  whoever's keeping the books

Bennye:  keeping the score, and they would say, oh, you got, you're playing spades. They say, oh, you got 200. He said, okay, we can't beat you I don't think so. 

Keisha:  Let's go back through these hands. Try to figure it out. So that was your town. So your town had stuff in it. You all needed your town in order to survive. And the town was called DeKalb. And there were these little communities around it. And maybe they weren't that little, but there were communities around it.   Okay, let's be honest, helped sustain DeKalb..

Bennye:  Of course. Absolutely.

Keisha: So it was a, it was a two way street. They supported each other. Right? So with all the people in those small communities that were out, some were black, some were distinctly white. Right? But they all supported that, quote, town, which is why when I was a little girl, Granny used to say, we’re going “Uptown”

Bennye: We're going Uptown.

Keisha: We’re going Uptown.

Bennye: And I remember as a child, I told mama one time, I said, why don't we, what do we need to do to become a town here? Can't we get our own post office and um, do all that? And she said, no, that's not something we, she did not even want to entertain the idea.

Keisha: It just was not within her scope of thinking.

Bennye: it was not. Absolutely.

Keisha: Yeah, there were just rules. 

Bennye: Yeah. There were rules that, you know, we had to follow. We couldn't park in the, on the main street. It was one red light, but, uh, we couldn't park, we had to park in the back of the stores, you know, it was, looking back on it, it was just, and, you know, it's like, that's the way it was, and we didn't rock the boat, and I think that's what terror can do to you. If you're living in a terror, under terror, that's what happens, and you, you know,

Keisha:  Let me ask you something about the way, the way it felt or your experience when you were inside some of those stores. So you would ,1st of all, have to go in through the back.

Bennye: yes,

Keisha: But secondly, what was the interaction like once you were inside? What, you know, because people are different, not everyone's the same. And so there may have been people who were nice, may have been people who were not so nice, as long as they stayed within the rules, right?

Bennye:   Right.

Keisha:  So I'm just wondering what, what your memory is of those experiences, those face to face encounters.  Can you share with us a little bit about that?

Bennye: Yeah, some of the people were nice, you know, they, they would say, how y'all doing today? You know, or howdy doody? 

Keisha:  Cordial.

Bennye:  Yeah, cordial, what are you looking for today? And we'll say what we're looking for. And they would say, well, you know, I'll bring something back here and let you look at it because they didn't want you really going through and looking at everything and touching and, um, you know,

Keisha: Strict rules about touching.

Bennye: Yes. Yes.  So they would kind of bring some stuff to the back. I remember them bringing a couple of pairs of shoes or something. And they would tell mama, have them try these on, you know, so we would, we would try them on and see if they fit. And, and, and they never really helped you with it.

You know, like today you go in and sometimes they will help fit the shoe on your foot and see if it's working. 

Keisha: Well, I don't even know if people do that that that much anymore, but there was a time

Bennye: true. There was a time when they did that.

Keisha: when people actually helped you with your shoes

Bennye: Yeah. And they would bring out the measuring thing to see what size you wore. 

Keisha: Right! The size of the foot size.  Or whatever

Bennye: But none of that happened, you know, we've just tried on and, you know, mama would feel around to see where your toe was and all that.

Keisha:   That’s a mess.

Bennye:  Yeah, or would you get some wear out of it or was it too, was your toe too close to it and we were going to have to change real soon and all that came into play.

Keisha: So you know, this is this is reminding me of, um, you know, we just watched the movie, Origin, which was amazing.  And we had read the book, Caste. And I think what you're alluding to is one of the, if I'm not mistaken, one of the pillars of, one of her theories of pillars of caste system is that the touch part,

Bennye: Uh huh. 

Keisha: the principle of contamination. I'm paraphrasing. I don't think it was exactly worded that way, but it's just this idea that this person can't get in the pool, this person can't be in the main part of the store because they might touch. They might contaminate, right? Yeah. And so you, you saw that with your own eyes. It was, you didn't have those words for it, but that was your lived experience.

Bennye: And, and even though they didn't say you are nasty or you're dirty, that was the implication. 

Keisha: Yes

Bennye:  Yeah, that was the implication. And we were probably some of the cleanest people around because - we were very clean.

Keisha: Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure.

Okay. So, we've talked about DeKalb.   So we've got an idea of where DeKalb is and tell us maybe a little bit about the communities that surrounded DeKalb. And when you say surround, you know, some of us might think at least I would I've been there. So I kind of have an idea. But when you say surround, these are like, miles apart.  So these are like multiple communities that are….10 miles, 15 miles, 5 miles, a good distance away from DeKalb.  Right? 

Bennye:  Right. 

Keisha: And what were those towns? Can you give us a couple of those towns? 

Bennye: those towns were, let's see, uh, Dalby Springs and that actually that was a white town. That was a little white town, Dalby Springs. And then there was Oak Grove and Garland. There was Oak Ridge, Eldorado, and Almont.   Then there was, Beaver Dam, which was down near Red River, which was a part of our town, as well.

Keisha: Beaver Dam is actually not that close, is it?   I feel like Red River was not that close.

Bennye: no, it's not, it's, it's a ways, it’s a ways. 

Keisha: it's a good drive away even now.  Yeah. 

Bennye: Right. And then my town Bethlehem. Yeah.

Keisha:  Umm hmmm.  And so Bethlehem was south of town.

Bennye: Bethlehem was five miles north.

Keisha: North?

Keisha: So you drove and leaving Dallas, you would go east and then you'd get off on 259 and go north to DeKalb.

Bennye: right.

Keisha: And then from DeKalb, you go north again?

Bennye: Yes, kind of north, kind of northeasterly.

Keisha: east. Oh,

Bennye: Yeah, kind of northeast. Uh 

Keisha: Ok, got it.

Bennye: To DeKalb. Yeah, to get to Bethlehem. Yeah.

Keisha: And so now we're in the town that raised you.

Bennye: Yeah, Bethlehem.

Keisha: Yes, we're in the community that raised you and tell us about Bethlehem,

Bennye: Bethlehem, I think was, I think Bethlehem might have been the largest community of all the communities around. You know, some of my friends and my brother Alvin and Merl and,  Joanne, yeah, and James, you know, some of the people I called and we sort of put our heads together and we made sort of like a human map of Bethlehem.

And we came up with between 90 and 100 families that lived in Bethlehem. Okay.

Keisha: That's a decent sized community.

Bennye: Yes. And each family, most families had children, some ranging from some might've had two or three, but some, a lot of families had large families, 7, 8, 10, 15,  some had 18 children.

Keisha: My granny has 16, but that's, that's another episode that we'll have to get into later.

Bennye: Yeah, right. Absolutely. vAlso, each community had their own school that went to, um, what? Sixth grade? Seventh grade. They went to seventh grade. And then a lot of them would come over to Bethlehem to go to high school because we had a, a first grade through 12th grade high school.

Keisha: So the Black communities that were dotted around DeKalb would somehow get their kids to Bethlehem for high school, basically, right? 

Bennye: were, they were provided a bus

Keisha: So they had a bus.  Bus went around, picked up all these kids and brought them to Bethlehem.  And there was not a Black school in DeKalb uptown?

Bennye: There was one, yes.

Keisha: There was one, so there were people who lived, Black people who lived in DeKalb, too?

Bennye: There were Black people, there was like pockets of Black people who lived in DeKalb.

Keisha:  I see. I see. Okay. But instead of those people in surrounding communities going to the DeKalb school, they went to the Bethlehem school.

Bennye: right, right. They went to their own school in their own community. And all of them had churches, at least one Baptist church.

Keisha: every community.

Bennye: Every community had a church.

And in Bethlehem, we had two churches, Mount Zion and Bethlehem, and they were two Baptist churches, and they were right across the street from each other.

Keisha: Still are, aren't they?

Bennye: Still are. Still are. Yes. Yeah.

Keisha: All right, so tell us about church. What was church for you all?

Bennye: Church, was one of the, it was like the center of, uh, our fellowshipping and our getting together, to just be together as a community and to love on each other and to, you know, serve God and draw our strength from there. And I remember, you know, like we had, now they have praise teams and all these things, but we had, we called it, uh, what did we call it?

Oh gosh.

Keisha: testimony service?

Bennye: Yeah, but it had another name too. Oh gosh. I can't remember the name of it, but yeah, but anyway, it was a time when we didn't have music for that. So we did old 100s where the deacons would line out a hymn and then everybody would get behind it and sing 

Keisha: Now, there are people listening who don't know what you're talking about. Can you, now you're a retired music teacher, so we're going to call on some of that to ask you to describe what a, first of all, hymns are just these traditional songs sung in church, but what's a lining of a hymn? What does that mean?

Bennye: The person who is the leader would actually say some words like, I love the Lord. He heard my cry and then everybody would say, I love, and then he would, he would, he or she, well, mostly it was he because the 

Keisha:  Mostly Isn't that interesting? 

So, That's an interesting point, ain't it?

Bennye: Yes, it is.

Keisha: How come the women didn't line the hymn?

Bennye: I don't know. I don't know, 

Keisha: Isn't that interesting? Hadn't thought about it, had you?

Bennye: I hadn't thought about it.

Right. But anyway, yeah. So they would, they would line the hymn out and everybody would sing, sing, sing with it.

Keisha: Right, so it's like a call and response

Bennye: all the responses were exactly what it was.

Keisha: An entire song was sung in call and response

Bennye: this is, and this is, came from Africa, 

Keisha: I mean, I'm sure it did. I just wish we understood which cultures and like what traditions. You know, so much of it we don't understand and we don't know.

Bennye: Right, right. Absolutely. Absolutely. And then when we would sing those songs where you needed a beat to keep the rhythm going, it was, it was really electric. 

Keisha: I'm sure. What did you use, your feet? How did you all keep? Yeah, use your feet.

Bennye: would use our feet and we would keep the beat, and it was really electric.

Keisha: There's nothing like that. It's just, it's irreplaceable.

Bennye: Yeah, we've lost that.

Keisha: Yeah, we have absolutely lost it.

Bennye: Yeah, we have.

Keisha: Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. So, that was church and y'all were 1. you were a family in your community that went to church. So, I guess I'm going to ask,

Bennye: Yeah, my daddy didn't, my daddy didn't go. 

Keisha: You said, hold on, wait, not everybody. 

Bennye: Yeah, my daddy didn't go. 

Keisha:  Okay.  He was not interested. 

Bennye:  He went to funerals.  He went to funerals. If there was a funeral, he would be there.

Keisha: Did he have a suit?

Bennye: He had a suit. He would wear it.

Keisha: He put it on for the funeral.

Bennye: but church? He didn't care anything about church. And I never really asked him what his real, you know, concern was about not going to church,

Keisha: Wouldn't that have been an interesting conversation?

Bennye: That would have been. I, yeah,

Keisha: You know, sometimes we miss the timing, you know, like, when we think of something, it's like too late to ask the person.

Bennye: right.

Keisha: what, what made them, what made his whole family, his wife and children were going to church every week. Right?  But he had no interest.

Bennye: And in most churches, even in most churches today, there are more women than men, you know.

Keisha: Was it true then, too, at your church?

Bennye: Yes, of course it was.

Keisha: So then that really harkens back to this question of, so why is it that only the deacons and the men were leading some parts of the service.

Bennye: Right, right. Absolutely.

Keisha: Okay. That's a whole nother podcast.

Bennye: a whole. That's a whole nother thing. Yes. Whole nother thing.

Keisha: All right. So you, I think you were going to tell us something about, the way your community interacted with each other, like, you know, how many people, you know, you all cooked everything from scratch. Cause there was really no, you weren't buying food. You weren't buying processed food. Like we're buying today. You were eating organically.

Bennye: Eating organically.

Keisha: Let's say, 

Bennye: Good food

Keisha: you were eating naturally the way people are paying a lot of money to eat today. 

Bennye: Absolutely. Absolutely. 

Keisha: So you all would do some of, would you do community cooking? Like would you all like share meals or would it just be that you all were generous if somebody asked you?

Bennye: Well, we shared meals at church, you know, like if there were annual days, if something was going on at church, we would have what we call dinner on the ground.

Keisha: Dinner on the ground. Now, were you sitting on the ground?

Bennye: No, we weren't sitting on the ground, but everybody would bring, everybody would bring something. They would put their food in a box or something.  And at the end of that church service, we would all go out and just, you would go from place to place and, uh, 

Keisha: Place to place like what? 

Bennye: like from, from car, from the back of cars is where they would have the food. Yeah. And

Keisha: it'd be like a, like a trunk, what do you call it? When people do it before football games, what do you call that? Tailgating.

Bennye: Yeah, there you go. It was like tailgating.

Keisha: It was like tailgating.  Wow. 

Bennye: So we would go from place to place and we knew who could cook and what they cooked good and all that.

Keisha: Right. Cause that is the point. Ain't it?  You, you know, you know, whose food you can eat.

Bennye: You know. You cannot eat everybody's food.

Keisha: Can not.  Oh gosh, that is so funny.  So what was your mom good at cooking?

Bennye: My mom was good at cooking most things.

Keisha: She was.

Bennye: This is not everything, except I tell you, she could not make a good crust for like, uh, those, uh, cream pies. Her crusts were never quite what they should be. Of course, she made a good crust for, um, what do you call it? Cobblers.

Keisha: Yes.

Bennye: And there's a difference in the crust.  Yes. But she couldn't make that crispy crust

Keisha: Kind of like the delicate crust 

Bennye: yeah, she 

Keisha: cool pie. A cool pie. 

Bennye: Oh, right, right. She never could get that one down, but everything else was spot on.

Keisha: Yeah. She was a great cook.

Bennye: Delicious. She was a great cook. 

Keisha: Yep. She was.

Bennye: Absolutely. And people would come by our house because we always had food left over. And, uh, because she always cooked the pot.

She always cooked pots of stuff. And I think that's why I still cook pots of food.

Keisha: You still do. You still do. You said, let's just cook and it'd be just me, you or just me, you and the kids, you know, 

Bennye: have a pot

Keisha: and you'd be like, honey, we could eat for two weeks on this meal.

Bennye: know, I know, you know, so people, I think they knew we always had food there. So they would stop by and, you know, as if they were just stopping by to say hello, because we visited, we visited each other a lot, you know, and

Keisha: Because you were in walking distance of each other, too. 

Bennye: Yes. And we sat, we would sit on the front porch and the adults would talk and laugh and we would, the kids would play and.  It was, it was really fun. Yeah.

Keisha: I bet it was.  I bet it was.

Bennye: Everybody looked after everybody's kids, so it's like, uh, wherever you were, if you were walking up and down the road and we weren't afraid, we lived in a safe community. Okay. I don't remember if we ever had a key to our house.

Keisha: You were telling me this the other day that you said, did you, did you ever lock the door? Did you…

Bennye: I, we never really locked the door. Our door was always… unlocked.

Keisha: did you have periods of time where nobody was at the house? Like it was empty?

Bennye: What do you mean?

Keisha: Like, did you have periods of time when the whole family left to go somewhere? School or work? Yeah. 

Bennye:  Yeah, yeah, yeah, all the time

Keisha: times when the house would sit um, like, like alone, the house is by itself 

Bennye: by itself. 

Keisha: and no, no key, no lock.

Bennye: no key, no lock. Yeah, we just go back, walk in the door.

Keisha:  That is fascinating

No, no strangers sitting up in there and nobody had taken anything. But for one thing, you ain't had nothing.

Keisha: Right. You said, what was there to take?

Bennye: They gonna walk out with a bed or something?

Keisha: Exactly. Blankets, quilts.

Bennye: Yeah. Yeah.

Keisha: But you know, that gives a new, that's a, it's an interesting thought, right? Because people associate crime with poverty. 

Bennye: Right. 

Keisha: wonder if it's not that it's poverty of spirit and not so much poverty of things and money. 

Bennye: Right.

Keisha: Because you all didn't have money.  You, you were poor, technically,

even though you were never hungry, like, we talked about in the 1st podcast, you had food to eat.  And like, your friend Miss Margaret says, God, I don't have no money, but don't make me need none Like I mentioned last time.

Bennye: Yeah. 

Keisha: So you all didn't have anything in the community also had people who didn't really have anything either. And so you can make the argument and I'm no sociologist, but I'm just thinking you all felt safe leaving these houses unguarded.

Bennye: Right.

Keisha: And nobody stole.

Bennye: Right. Right.

Keisha: and they weren't, there weren't a lot of like incidents of people getting hurt. Right. Or that kind of violence. So, it really does make you wonder and question, even this assumption that, you know, crime is related to poverty because maybe it's not, maybe there's something else at play because what you all did have, though, was peace, fresh air and you had people loving on you, even though you were living well, living within a caste system, you knew that you had boundaries that you couldn't cross.

Right. But you did have the stuff that you need in order to grow as a human being. And I wonder if that makes a difference, but I'm going off on a tangent. Okay. 

Let me go back here. So is there anything else about Bethlehem or DeKalb that we haven't talked about that you want to cover?

Bennye: Well, the only thing is, you know, like I said, we took care of each other. it would be nothing for mama to say …if she started making cornbread and she realized that she didn't have any baking powder, she'd get me a little, uh, container or something, a little bowl or something and say, go up to Aunt Mitt’s and ask her for a couple of tablespoons of butter, of, uh, baking powder

Keisha: baking powder or whatever it was you needed 

Bennye: or whatever it was. 

Yeah. And I, and I would go up there or somebody would run up there and get it and come back and she would finish making it.  So we had that kind of relationship. And I think what happened was when I got to Boston we lived in an apartment at BU. And I think one time I didn't have something so I told Miles, I said, go and ask somebody and he looked at me kind of strange.

He said, I don't think we do that here, you know.

Keisha: I don't think that's gon fly here.

Bennye: I don't think that's going to fly here.

Keisha: But, you know, the interesting thing is it may have actually been okay. Right. But in our minds, certain situations, you just wouldn't ask a neighbor that, you know, as you said, but that's kind of how I grew up. So why can't we ask somebody, you know?

Bennye: Yeah, we had to get used to a whole nother culture,

Keisha:  Exactly. completely different culture.

Bennye: a completely different culture. so what else do we need to cover here with the, um,

Keisha: Well, I, I really like the….

Bennye: okay, I'm painting our, our community as, and it really was a great community, full of spirit, good spirit, but there were a few bad apples.

Keisha: Okay, you said they weren't all good apples.

Bennye: They weren't all good apples.

Okay, because I remember two or three girls getting raped. By, there was one guy 

Keisha: One guy who raped a couple of people, because he was a rapist.

Bennye: because he was a rapist

Keisha: And he needed to have been dealt with.

Bennye: He needed to have been dealt with.

Keisha: but he was Black and the people who were raped were Black.

Bennye: yes, and because because we were, we did not deal with the uh, policemen. 

Keisha: We have one, one cop.

Bennye: One cop, yeah, who put, who put his little light up on top of his car and hope it wouldn't fall off when he was trying to go somewhere.

But anyway, so they never were really dealt with because they never, we didn't report it. We just, we tried to ostracize them and take care of the girls as best we could, but it's, it's sad. And I remember one was my friend and she was so smart. She was so smart in math. It's no telling where she could have gone, what she could have done.

But she…..was cut off at the knees.

Keisha: Yeah, she was traumatized, obviously.

Bennye: She was traumatized,

Keisha: and she didn't recover and she wasn't able to find the help she needed.

Bennye: not recover. I don't even think she came back to school. I'm trying to think.

Keisha: Oh, my goodness.

Yeah, so it wasn't like a panacea, you know, it wasn't like a. You know, it wasn't like this lily, happy, go lucky community. It had human frailty.

Bennye: it had human frailty.

Keisha: just like all communities, right? All humans do.

Bennye: Right, right. 

Keisha: But do 

Bennye: the time that I'm, that I'm kind of highlighting here is like between the 40s and the 60s until I left home, you know?

Keisha: yeah. And I, and I wonder what kind of lesson we have learned as a people about, being able to have some violence in our communities that went unaddressed.

Bennye: Right.

Keisha: You know, and what lessons you take from that, even if it's subconscious, you know, like, are your, you know, is your life as valuable as someone else?

Because if he had raped a white girl, I promise you, he would have been punished, probably killed, probably killed. right, so the value that was. I mean, there was just such a discrepancy in the value placed on each different life and why, because I'm sure that the community knew that he wasn't going to get any justice if they had gone to the cops, or that if they had gone to the cops, something else may have happened.  right, kind of that they weren't looking for, you know, it's almost like digging, it's like creating trouble where, you know, they don't really want to upset that, that nest. And so it's just really, it's very painful to think about that.

Bennye: Yeah. And actually, there was one time when we had a couple of people who were mentally ill in our community.

And, um, you know, they would walk the roads and I remember one time, one of them got a hold of a gun from some place and he was walking around and we were all kind of afraid because we didn't know what he was going to do.

And I think somebody did call, call the cops to come and see if they could get it from him or whatever.  But we were so afraid. I remember being so afraid that they were going to kill him, but so everybody kept saying, please don't shoot him.

Don't shoot him. 

And they didn't. The guy, the guy didn't, you know, you know, yup

Keisha: A difficult situation.

Bennye: right.

And thinking today about what the town is like, you know, after I gave all these statistics about how many stores and everything was in Dekalb.  Today, there's hardly one grocery store.

Keisha: Mm hmm.

Bennye: The population in Bethlehem, I think probably has gone down from, I said, a hundred families or 90 or whatever. There may be two or three families that's living there.

I'm not quite sure how many, but it's gone down to nothing. Our church was scheduled to be closed because they didn't have enough people to keep it open.

Keisha: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Bennye: They did have a pastor, but you know, 

Keisha: Two or three people coming. Yeah.

Bennye: 2 or 3 people coming. So, when I talked to my math teacher, 

Keisha: who is still alive. 

Bennye: 95

Keisha: Amazing.

Bennye: She goes to that church, goes to our church, and she said that they, uh, we're going to try to have church once a month and just get somebody to come in and preach to whoever was there.

Keisha: Okay.

Bennye: So, and, and what happened was, there was, um, there were two, ammunition plants, government ammunition plants that employed people, so people had employment, but they closed, or one of them stayed open with minimum, um,

Keisha: hmm. Minimal staff. Yep.

Bennye: operations, staff, or whatever. So, it has gone down to almost a ghost town, I would say.

You know, so to go back, it's, it's really, I don't know, it's hard.

Keisha: Sad.

Bennye: Sad. Yeah.

Keisha: So it's, it's, what's happened to it is what's happened to so much of rural America, right?   So many different places.

Bennye: But I think our community, our community, was as much a savior for us as it could be. You know, under the system that we lived under, where we weren't really considered people. So, um,

Keisha: I think the beauty in that, I mean, I definitely agree with you 100%, but I find the beauty in the stories that you tell about your childhood is the beauty and the value that you placed on each other.

Bennye: Right.

Keisha: You had very limited ability to affect how other people perceived you. Mm hmm. That's still true today, right?

Bennye: Right. 

Keisha: But, you know, we really valued each other and had a strong community.

Bennye: Yes, absolutely.

Keisha: I think that's why we have

Bennye: why we have survived.

Keisha:  that’s why we've survived.

Bennye: Yes, that's how we have we have always felt that it would get better.

We've always had hope and we still have hope.

Keisha: We do. 

Bennye: I am so happy to share this part of my life, living in Bethlehem and in DeKalb.   It’s just good to remember and put it into some kind of perspective.

Keisha: Well, I’m so glad that you had the chance to share this with us, because otherwise how would we know the stories.  So thank you, it was fun.  I really appreciate your doing it.

Bennye: Much fun.  Thank you so much.

Keisha:  And thanks to all the listeners who joined in again and we will see you next time.

Bennye:  Next time.   Until we meet

Keisha:  Until we meet