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Interview with Milt Hinton
Interviewer: Billy Taylor
Washington, D.C.

TAYLOR:
[lA-000] Milt, this is gonna be really "This is Your Life" kind of interview. I've talked to you on many occasions. and. you know you've shared a lot of your memories with me. But, I'd really like to go back and do some things we haven't done. First of all, let's talk about your childhood. I mean. what you remember. We'll start with your childhood. Do you remember your grandparents?

HINTON:
[1A-005] Yeah, both my grandmothers. I remember both of my grandmothers. In fact, my mother's mother was born a slave. She was born a slave of Toe Davis, Jefferson Davis' father - who was president of the South. And after the Emancipation Proclamation, she took the name of the overseer which was "Carter." So her name was Hettie Lettie Carter. And after the Emancipation, she married a man named Matt Robinson. So her last name was Hettie Lettie Carter Robinson.

[lA-010] And she... He... This man had a little horse and a buggy and he had... He was a hack man, he had his rig what you call a carriage. So he did very well. They had about fifteen children.

TAYLOR:
[1A-012] Really?

HINTON:
[1A-012] Most of 'em didn't really live. Only five of 'em really lived to adulthood. One of which was my mother. And they...

TAYLOR:
[1A-014] Why did they lose so many? Did they...

HINTON:
[1A-014] Well, smallpox. She smo... told us so much, so, such terrible things about what happened with smallpox down there. She, she worked... Her husband died five months after, before the last child was born.

TAYLOR:
[1A-017] No kidding?

HINTON:
[1A-017] So she had... this woman had twelve or thirteen children.

TAYLOR:
[1A-017] Excuse me... [to sound person: What are we getting? Okay.] I'm sorry, so you were saying that smallpox and...

HINTON:
[1A-019] Yeah, well she... My grandfather died. I never saw either one of my grandfathers. But my grandmother, on my mother's side, her husband died five months before his last child was born.

TAYLOR:
[1A-020] My goodness.

HINTON:
[1A-020] And you can imagine an old lady with ten or twelve children, a black woman in Pittsburgh, Mississippi, in those days. She had a tough time. But she r... she worked for a family, as maid, that owned a department store - Bear Brothers. Bear was their name. And they... they paid her $3.50 a week for washing and ironing and cookin', and everything. But she cooked enough [unclear] she wanted enough for them. So she fixed for them, and had enough left over for her children. They'd come in the back door after she fed her family, and give the children to take home, the older ones to take home to the younger ones.

[1A-027] And she's, evidentially, was a very progressive type of an old lady. I know she was, because she lived quite some time. She asked this man if he could, if he... if she could a put a little stand up outside of his store. 'Cause in the morning, people would be comin' to work and she sell 'em a cup a coffee and two biscuits for five cents. In those days she had made the jelly. And then she augmented her sal... her $3.50 salary doin' this.

[1A-032] And she told about the sad thing of how she lost so many children. During the... they had an epidemic of smallpox, and there was no place for black people.

TAYLOR:
[1A~033] No hospital...

HINTON:
[1A-033] No hospital. They had what they called a "Chest House," where they put them and they car... They quarantined our house, where she... so she couldn't even get to her children.

TAYLOR:
[1A-035] Ch, my.

HINTON:
[1A~035] She had to put food under the gate to them. She... they were quarantine then. And the ones that were babies - the really too small to get around -they'd let her take them to this Chest House. So she wound up in this Chest House with them. And she told me what a terrible place it was. They didn't give 'em water; people were drinkin' out of the urinal. And she said she could see, in the morning, she could see... They had what they called a '[unclear]," that's a two-wheel, a two-wheel wagon. She said, [unclear] had carted off black people. They would be groanin', they would still take 'em to the grave yard. They were still...

[1A-041] So it was kind of a tough scene for her. But she was a Christian lady, and she grew... She lived until I was in Cab Calloway's band -1939.

TAYLOR:
[1A-042] Really? My god!

HINTON:
[1A-042] One hundred and three years old, she made. She's the one that really kept our family together. My mother...

TAYLOR:
[1A-043] What about your other grandmother?

HINTON:
[1A-044] My other grandmother was from Africa.

TAYLOR:
[1A-044] Uh huh. Really?

HINTON:
[1A-044] Yes. She was brought here by missionaries. My father was brought here by missionaries. And that's where we had the conflict in our family. They brought the African people here through Mississippi, and they could conform to the society. My father married my mother; and he, naturally he was a young man. And they sent him to school for agriculture. But he couldn't conform with those conditions. So he left that. My mother and him separated when I was three months old. And she never saw my father again. He had ... I saw him when... The first time I saw my father, I was thirty years old.

TAYLOR:
[1A-051] Really?

HINTON:
[1A-051] In Cab's band.

TAYLOR:
[1A-OS1) He was still, he was still here in the States?

HINTON:
[1A-051] He, he went to Africa. Firestone had built a rubber plantation there. Fine rubber would grow in Africa the same way it would grow in South America. So in Liberia, they had this rubber plantation. And they used these blacks that could, had some, some advancement about agriculture. So my dad went back there. [unclear] he wasn't too successful there, even though he managed this plantation. And he came back to the United States, but he didn't come back to my mother. He came back to Memphis, Tennessee. And he was very well educated in his agriculture. And a cotton
sampler was the best job a black man could have down in the South; 'cause he had that big machete, and when the cotton sam... the cotton buyers had to go buy cotton, he had to rely on the cotton sampler - this black guy - to push his machete and feel that cotton and tell him whether it was grade A or grade B cotton. And they deal accordin' to that. So that was a pretty important job and a good job.

[1A-063] So he, he was doin' that. That's when I saw rum. I was playin' with Cab Calloway.

TAYLOR:
[1A-064] You were traveling in the South?

HINTON:
[1A-064] I was travelin' in the South with Cab Calloway's band. Cozy Cole and Chu Berry was in that about that time. And I was playin' a solo, and Benny playin', the piano player said to me, said, "I heard your father's in town. Did you see him?" I said, "No. " [laughs] He said, "Well, there he is, standin' over there in the wings." And I saw this guy standin' over there, lookin' exactly like me! Like me. I didn't know what to say to him. He had contributed nothin' towards
my education and my well-being. And my mother had to see... I was feelin' so... And I didn't know what to say when he said the right words. He said, "Your mother's done a wonderful job." When he gave mother credit, then I hugged him and kissed rum. And Cozy Cole and Chu Berry, and all those, went to the bar and had a drink together.

[1A-072] So he stayed there in Memphis. And then when they built the atomic bomb, built the atomic bomb in Oakridge, they ... everybody was concerned with cotton we used down there. Cotton is the basis... cotton, that's the trung that's the basis for explosives.

etc ...

TAPE COUNTER:
EXAMPLE: [lA.574]
1=tape one A=side A. 574=tape counter number (based on tape duplicates)

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