This is the story of Mr. Johnnie Evans who is ninety-seven years old. He was born in DeSoto Parish, in the backwoods of Mansfield, Louisiana in the year 1912. Johnnie lived with his family on the family farm “that had been handed on from the days of slavery”. Johnnie states that his ancestors, the Hamptons, came from Georgia. He said that the Hamptons were slave people that brought Johnnie’s people from Georgia to New Orleans to sell. Johnnies’ grandparents were sold in New Orleans on a slave block. He said that the Hamptons sold them and the Evans, from Mansfield, bought them; therefore, they are named Evans because of slavery. He grew up on the land that was given to his family. Johnnie said that when the Yankees won the Civil War, they fixed it where the slaves would get some of the land from the plantation owner, so his people got the land that he grew up on. This is one reason his family did not suffer as much during the Great Depression years as others because they owned their own land. During the Great Depression there was no such thing as tractors, so the family farmed the land with mules which was “nothing but hard work, hard work”. From the land they grew all their food such as peas, beans, okra, and sweet potatoes. They ate rabbits, possum, squirrel, coons, and many other animals. Johnnie milked the cows which provided them with milk and butter. Also, in the backwoods they would catch and eat pigs and chickens that were allowed to run free in the woods because they did not have stockyards. . In addition to all of that, everybody had sugar cane or sorghum. He said he stripped many a stalk of cane, using just his teeth because they did not have a knife.
At the beginning of the Great Depression Johnnie was seventeen years old. He remembers that the Great Depression was so tough that the family had no flour except every once in a while, but they did have cornmeal. Johnnie’s father worked for the railroad as a time maker which was a hard job working all day for a dollar and a half sometimes, and sometimes less. Johnnie began working in the fields picking cotton with his mother when he was very young. Johnnie picked cotton for twenty five cents a pound. He said,” If you pick a full 100 lbs. of cotton you didn’t see a dollar, but in so many days I couldn’t make a quarter because the boll weevils and caterpillars ate the cotton up and sometimes it rained too much.” I picked that cotton and it was hot. I felt so bad. I did it myself, trying to help my people on the farm.” Another means of money was the wool that they sheared from the sheep that they raised. Johnnie’s job was to pull the burrs off the wool. Then his mom and grandma would actually wash the wool, place it on a palette and let it dry. His grandfather learned how to ship things, so they shipped the wool along with coon hides, goat hides, and possum hides off to market to sell. He remembered that when a cow or mule died, they would skin the animal, clean the hide, stretch the hide on the back of a building, allow it to dry and ship it with the other hides. As you can see, during the Great Depression money was very hard to come by, but at least Johnnie and his family had plenty to eat and did not go hungry.
As far as school was concerned, Johnnie remarked,” The people didn’t go to school. During the Great Depression then, they just didn’t have much education to amount to anything.” Johnnie recalls that when he told his grandchildren that he was twelve years old in the second grade that they stated, “Granddaddy you were twelve in the second grade. You were pretty dumb weren’t you?” Johnnie replied, “No baby, back in those days Negros couldn’t go to school.” He said that in DeSoto Parish during the Great Depression, the school board allowed the Negro children three months of schooling, but if the weather was bad they could not walk to school. The white children had school buses, but not the black children. Johnnie said,” My people wanted you to get a little education so we fought for that and they finally got me to come up here in Mansfield; everybody goes to school here during the Great Depression.” He walked seventeen miles to Mansfield every day and managed to get through high school. Johnnie was the first black boy from his community to finish high school. The school superintendant helped to get Johnnie in college and he said “I was doing pretty good, then the war broke out and I had to go to the military.” He continued, saying “I wanted to get an education where I wouldn’t have to do all the hard work I came up doing. I did that all my life. When Uncle Sam took me, he got me to go to Columbia University.” Hooray, hooray for you Mr. Johnnie because you did it! He graduated from Southern University and received a Masters Degree from Colombia University in New York.
As you can see, Johnnie’s life of work and school left very little time for a social life. However, he did play ball He remembered that he was on a baseball team and on Saturday evenings the team would sometimes play until 12 o’clock and “then they had a little dance”. Also, Johnnie and his friends enjoyed swimming in their “birthday suits” since they did not have trunks. Johnnie tells us that all the black boys and white boys stuck together. He said they lived like that and to this day he has good white friends that meet up and talk about the good times like stealing watermelons. He said that most everyone had a watermelon patch and the boys would sometime steal a watermelon. He remembered a time when his cousin stole a watermelon from his auntie’s watermelon patch. He said they kept passing through that watermelon patch and those watermelons looked so good that they just “up and took one.” His auntie missed the watermelon and she confronted them, saying “Ya’ll went in my watermelon patch,” and they said,” No we didn’t.” Then she said,” Don’t tell me a lie, I hate a lie. If you had asked me for a watermelon I would have gave it to you, but ya’ll stole my watermelon and I hate a rogue. If you do it again I’ll have to put you in jail.” They knew she meant it because once before a boy in town had taken a watermelon out of her patch, and a bloodhound named Ole Buck tracked the boy’s scent right to the door of the boy’s house. Johnnie recounted that when the mother of the boy told the trackers that the boy was not there, the trackers said,” Well, we’ll have to take you because Ole Buck’s not a lair.” Immediately, the boy’s mother went and got the boy and they locked him up, and he cried all night. It didn’t take long to spread through the community that Ole Buck knew the truth. Knowing this story, Johnnie said,” So let me tell you we didn’t go back there anymore.”
In conclusion, Mr. Evans at 97 lives alone in his home in Mansfield. He does have a niece that helps him with the housework. He still loves to tell stories and gives talks at the Community Center. He is a retired teacher and is very proud that he earned a Master of Education Degree from Colombia University.
