By Norman Cain, December 5, 2016 — Generally speaking, Saturday afternoon was the only time that black folk had time to relax. The week found them toiling in the field from sun-up to sun-down each day. Some would be migrant tobacco warehouse workers who were there for the summer from distant areas, even distant states. Folk from the area would arrive in the town known as Pamplico, South Carolina by foot, in tattered cars, pedaling rickety bikes in the beds of worn pickup trucks, driving old sputtering tractors, riding mules and sitting on the floors of mule-drawn wagons.
As a rule, Women would have on smock dresses; their hair would be pressed in place by hot combs; girls with bow ribbons in plaited hair. The boys would generally have on dungarees and the men would have on wide brim straw hats with matching khaki pants and shirts.
Some black folk were in the vise of peonage or severe form of share-cropping, and as a result of their fatal situation did not venture from the sides of their (I hate to say it) masters, in the white section of town, where a few of the white folks sat upon benches. By their sides sat their sad silent charges – black men and women spewing sorrowfulness from souls. Those black folks were the new age slaves. I actually saw several black women nursing white children.
Basically, in this section of town, only a few black folk could be found. White women and men filled the sidewalks with a blatant air of superiority, conversing in a dialect that I could not cipher. Other white folk busied themselves, shopping in the pharmacy, piggy wiggly supermarket, restaurants, hardware store, clothing store, gun shop, toy stores – establishments that blacks were not allowed in, or if allowed in, had to resort to maintaining a subservient role.
Near the borders of the white section of town, there were several honky tonks that lined both sides of the street, where their young could be seen dancing a swing dance known as the frug. On the borders of the white side of town, there was a barber shop and wooden movie house where blacks were required to sit in the balcony.The black side of Pamplico, South Carolina railroad tracks had no more than three shack-structured convenience stores where the most trivial of the needs of black folk are sold. Well, over 90% of life necessities were from the farms – meat from smokehouses, vegetables from gardens, fruit and nuts from trees, grapes from vines, juice from lemon trees. The three block, unpaved street was lined with several restaurants, a barber-shop, beauty shops, churches, funeral pallor, rooming house, school, houses, and juke joints from which the down-home blues escaped and young folk vigorously danced. Sunday was the day of lodge meetings and sometimes ecstatic church services.