34 Our State July 2009 Reprinted with permission by Our State magazine. Reprinted with permission by Our State magazine. www.ourstate.com 35

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The Art of TalkThe University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill aims to create a portrait of North Carolina and

the South through oral histories of leaders and everyday folk.

Their stories are a history that’s as much about perspective as it is about fact: “I was there, and this is how it was for me.” Pastors and a future president; glove makers, governors, and grandmothers; sewing machine operators, senators, and civil rights activists — more than 4,000 voices from the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill bring to life the events and experiences that shaped North Carolina, the South, our nation, and our world.

‘History from the bottom up’“For years, I wanted to do research on stock car racing and basketball,” says Dr. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, now in her 36th year as director of the Southern Oral History Program, a component of UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South. “Those sports are important social and cultural phenomena — especially in North Carolina.”

Traditionalists might exclude Junior Johnson’s voice from the historic record but not Hall. She landed on UNC’s doorstep in 1973 determined to practice what she calls “history from the bottom up.” It’s a departure from what used to be oral history protocol at her alma mater, Columbia University, where names of the rich and famous once dominated the world’s oldest and

largest university-based collection. “Much of history has been written by the victors,

the decision-makers, the leaders,” Hall says. “But our process is more inclusive.” As interviewee and former mill worker Nell Sigmon put it, “You don’t have to be famous for your life to be history.”

Like most oral histories in the program, Sigmon’s was gathered under the auspices of research. Hall and her team of faculty members and graduate students identify a topic for discovery and then find people like Sigmon whose lives or livelihoods inform it. According to David Cline, associate director of the Southern Oral History Program, success or failure often hinges on searching out “the gatekeeper.”

“In every community, there are one or two people who hold the key,” he says, “and they’re not the town gossips. They’re just people who know their neighbors and friends and have their trust. We call them the gatekeepers. If we can identify the gatekeepers in a community, doors that might have been closed will open.”

One such gatekeeper was the late Edwin Caldwell Jr. of Chapel Hill, whose roots in the local African-American community Cline describes as “long and deep.” When Caldwell’s friend and tennis partner Bob Gilgor — a retired white Chapel Hill physician-

By Chrys Bullardphotography by bryan regan

Director Jacquelyn Dowd Hall (far left), Associate Director David Cline, Outreach Coordinator Elizabeth Millwood, and Coordinator of Digital Intiatives Seth Kotch preserve local voices and stories as part of the Southern Oral History Program.

36 Our State July 2009 Reprinted with permission by Our State magazine.

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turned-documentarian — wanted to interview teachers, staff, and alumni from Lincoln High School, the town’s all-black high school before desegregation, Caldwell agreed to help Gilgor make connections. Later, when students in Jacquelyn Hall’s class researched the same topic, Caldwell again provided essential guidance and advice. “He opened up many avenues for us in the Chapel Hill African-American community,” Cline says.

After interviews are conducted, staff members create transcripts and send the oral and written records to the Southern Historical Collection in Wilson Library, where they’re available to the public. More than 500 interviews can now be searched and found online.

Slave narratives gathered during the 1930s Federal Writers’ Project seeded Hall’s program, now among the

nation’s most influential. “When I came here, I wanted to create resources on which historians will rely when they write about the 20th century,” she says. And that’s just what they did. Strengths in the Great Depression, the transition from agriculture to industry, the Civil Rights Movement, and notable Southerners continue to inspire books and garner awards, including Hall’s National Humanities Medal from President Bill Clinton — incidentally an interviewee during his unsuccessful 1974 run for the United States House of Representatives.

Dr. William R. Ferris, former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities and now senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South calls the collection, “a national treasure,” and former students find themselves in the high cotton of academia, libraries, and museums. “The Southern Oral History Program is one of the great resources on the history of the South in the 20th century,” says Dr. Brent Glass, director of the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution and a UNC graduate student from 1975 to 1976. “Of equal importance has been the training and development of students who have taken positions in colleges, universities, and historical organizations.

“The Southern Oral History Program is one of the great resources on the history of the South

in the 20th century.”

Interviewer: Who taught you to drive?

Junior Johnson: My daddy, I think, had a big influence on me, and I had two brothers that was very influencing on driving. Both of them was older than I was, and they was kinda in the moonshine-hauling business. I picked up on fast cars and stuff because I seen them doing ’em and driving ’em and had an opportunity to see their mistakes and stuff. And I picked up on the fast cars and driving basically when I was just a young boy through my father’s effort of trying to have fast cars to haul whiskey with and my brothers.

— From a 1988 interview with Wilkes County stock car racer Junior Johnson

Interviewer: What makes a good doffer?

Carrie Lee Gerringer: Just being fast. You have to be fast with your hands.

Interviewer: You have to get the bobbins right . . .

Gerringer: Off and put an empty one on. And he could really do that thing. Well, he started when he was 11 years old a-doffing, and he doffed all of his life.

— From a 1979 interview with former Bynum textile worker Carrie Lee Gerringer, who talks about her husband’s job in the mill

Paul Green: So poverty was just natural to me. It was natural and in the ’30s was just an old familiar thing. Of course, some of us had been able to … I was able to get an old Tin Lizzie, a Ford, to drive during the Depression. I was able to continue because I was teaching here and I got some sort of salary, not much. But all down in eastern North Carolina where I was born, the people were reduced to what they called “Hoover carts.” I don’t know whether you know what a Hoover cart is. Well, they weren’t able to buy gasoline, and they would take two wheels off of a Ford and put it to a cart and have a mule or horse to pull it.

— From a 1975 interview with Chapel Hill playwright Paul Green

38 Our State July 2009 Reprinted with permission by Our State magazine.

tar heel historyMy tenure (there) had a major impact on my scholarship and career as a public historian.”

Love of conversationMemory is the shared inheritance of oral tradition, and oral tradition is the shared inheritance of every Southerner. In the country store, at the church picnic, on the front porch, or by the fireplace, memory and story mingle, marry, and become one. Ferris, a nationally recognized scholar and professor of Southern studies, African-American music, and folklore, documents their power.

“Southerners more than any other American group have a deep love for conversation and stories,” he says. “This talk is not only a way of communicating — it’s an art. It bonds people together as a family, a community, and a region in deep and powerful ways.”

Ferris traces the South’s oral tradition back to antiquity: the Pentateuch, the Bhagavad Gita, the Iliad, and the Odyssey. Of the three genres of the spoken word — music, prose narrative, and the remembered experience, or memorat, the memorat is the largest body of all. “Every family has a rich body of lore they tell and retell,” Ferris says. “And people never get tired of hearing these stories even though they know the ending. It’s the telling that’s so wonderful.”

Chrys Bullard is a freelance writer who lives in Chapel Hill.

For a link to the Southern Oral History Program website, to access the oral histories portioned in this article, and for a complete list of interviews in the collection, go to www.ourstate.com, and click on “This Month’s Issue.”

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