Esphur and Harold Foster - On What Makes a Neighborhood a Real Community (clip)
Interviewed by Hudson Vaughan on April 1, 2010
Hudson Vaughan: All these stories, I feel like, speak to really what makes a neighborhood. But could you talk a little bit about what you feel like have been the most valuable aspects of the neighborhood you’ve grown up in? And if maybe it has changed then what that change has been like.
Esphur Foster: It has really been the respect of our elders. I mean, bottom line, the respect of the elders. During that time we could only go to school, to church, Sunday school. And if you did not go to Sunday school and church on Sunday there was no need to talk about going to the movie because if you didn’t feel good enough to go to church…
Hudson Vaughan: …you didn’t feel good enough to go to the movies!
Esphur Foster: We got the same lesson and our core values from those three and each one reinforced what you learned.
Hudson Vaughan: So from the three what…
Esphur Foster: Church, school, and home. And it was always home, Sunday school and church, and then school and they would just reinforce and you heard the same thing, the same thing was expected of you.
Hudson Vaughan: What were those things that were expected of you?
Esphur Foster: About respecting each other, doing your homework, doing work at home, your assignments that you had due. Help – like if old people, somebody, needed something from the store, you go to the store you better not charge by just for Bynum Weavers. You’d get killed. We would help each other like Granny Flacks, I know you’ve heard about Granny Flacks.
Hudson Vaughan: Mmm mmm [as if shaking head no]
Esphur Foster: You’ve never heard about Granny Flacks? Granny Flacks was a free slave. Her mother was white and her father was a slave and her husband was one of the ministers at Saint…
Hudson Vaughan: Oh really? At Saint Joseph’s?
Esphur Foster: Yeah. She was a petite lady, real real light skinned, blue eyes. She always had a garden and had corn. So in the fall we would all [emphasized], everybody in the neighborhood, would go help her. The corn would be stacked up to the ceiling and we would all go help her shuck corn. And I don’t know who took the corn to Durham for her to have it ground into meal. And then that was money for her plus she would have meal for the summer. She had a spinning wheel and we were just hypnotized by it. Because she was a free slave, she was allowed to stay home and she was taught to do things that ladies did like knit, crochet, embroider, spin. You know, she didn’t have to do meal or housework [in the garden], that kind of stuff. We were just really fascinated by that spinning wheel [trails off].
