INTERVIEW NO. 3 FLORENCE HAYES

Florence and her daughters.

Okay, my maiden name is Florence Louvinia Morbley, and my name now is Florence Hayes. And I was born on March 2, 1951, in Lexington, Kentucky. My birth certificate is so old that where it says “race,” mine has the word colored.

Well, in Lexington, Kentucky, my dad, he was somebody that bathed the horses and took care of them. So I figure we lived for free from his services of taking care of the horses. The horses he took care of were the horses that went to different races like the Kentucky Derby and other horse-racing activities. Then, we moved to Nashville. We came on a train down at the L&N train station on Union or Broad or wherever it is. But that was a real train station. And we came on the train and moved to Nashville. And I went to Wharton School and Pearl High School. I went to kindergarten also in Nashville. So pretty much all my schooling was in Nashville.

You know, I didn’t realize I had actually moved somewhere probably until I wasn’t where I grew up. I don’t know why we moved. Everywhere I lived, there was no indoor plumbing. So, interestingly enough, when I got in the 11th grade, we moved into a house that had indoor bathtubs and hot running water.

What did your parents do for work when they got to Nashville?

My dad, he worked at the stockyard. It used to be a place down in Nashville where people bought and sold their candles and goods. And it was called a stockyard. But it’s probably updated now, there’s probably some nice restaurants or something there now. It was down on First Avenue in Nashville.

And then, when I was probably seven, my dad hung himself. That happened in Gallatin, Tennessee, because we were visiting my mom’s brother and his wife. So he hung himself, and that was when I was probably in first grade.

I grew up in an era where you really didn’t ask a lot of questions. You kind of just went with the flow. And I didn’t know to ask questions. And probably knew not to ask questions. My mom became a single parent. She did pretty well, but during that time I thought she was really strict for no reason. But she became a single parent all of a sudden, so everything changed.

My uncle found my dad hanging. Back then, when a meal is fixed, you don’t eat until everybody comes to the table. So we were waiting on him to come to breakfast. Bacon and eggs and biscuits and homemade jelly was sitting in the house, and we was waiting on him to come in to say the blessing. And of course, back then, the bathrooms were outside, also. So after he didn’t return for a while, my uncle went out. Interestingly enough, there’s a college called Vol State in Gallatin. And part of that university is built on that property where my dad hung himself.

They expanded it because the people that owned the property, they were very wealthy people in Gallatin, and that’s who my uncle worked for. He took care of his sheep and blueberries and blackberries … he did that type of work. I think my dad went there maybe to look for work or something. I don’t know exactly why we went to visit, but we went to visit them. We rode the Greyhound bus down there and I don’t know how we got back. After my dad died, I don’t remember a lot of what happened in between, you know?

My dad.… I always knew every Friday that he would bring home some bananas. Every Friday like clockwork. I would sit on the porch and wait for him to turn that corner. And he always had bananas with him. And when it was real cold and my mom wanted to dress me one way, but if I didn’t want to wear that, when my mom would already be gone to work, I would talk my dad into letting me wear what I wanted to wear. And I remember one time after that, she always got me ready before she left, because I guess it was cold and maybe he just let me wear something that could be some summertime thing. I know he didn’t have any choice in helping me get dressed anymore after that!

It was just me and my mom after he died. My mom and my dad apparently never got married. I don’t know why. I don’t have any siblings. I used to ask my mom if I had sisters and brothers, and she would say, “Sure, you do,” but she never gave me any names or a way of trying to find them. So, to my knowledge, I don’t have any sisters and brothers.

When we returned to Nashville, she did day work. That’s like when you clean people’s houses and they pay you every day. She had certain houses that she did maybe twice a week or whatever. And we lived with her other sister until my mom found somewhere for us to live alone. That was the first place that didn’t have indoor plumbing. And then we moved to another place that didn’t have plumbing, but it was much nicer than the first place. Finally, we moved to a house with the indoor plumbing. And that was how I knew about it—I’d go to my friends’ houses and see that they had bathrooms. But I didn’t worry about that because I was always fed and was never hungry.

I still have one friend that, even when I didn’t have what she had, her parents would make sure they bought me Easter outfits and things like that to help my mom, and help me not be without. So we always ended up in a circle of good people. So I guess I didn’t feel so deprived. If they took their daughter out to dinner, they took me too, so it was like, I didn’t pay the price because I moved around just as much as everybody else did. Maybe a different fashion.

My mom never really talked about my dad’s death. We had to survive and make it without him. That’s not what she said, but that was in her actions. Even when I got older, she never really mentioned him. And neither did I.

In the back of my mind, I’ve always felt that my dad was lynched. When they took me outside that day, see, there was a bucket that you would sit on when you were milking a cow. And he was hanging above that, and the bucket was kicked over. When you hang yourself, apparently once you hang, you kind of unwind and go back the other way. But your head is still in the noose. And he was actually going back the other way. I still remember seeing that bucket. I saw his body. He was hanging there. I don’t ever remember anybody asking me any questions. Nobody.

There are a lot of things about this that aren’t panning out. There was a time, when I found out they were going to build Vol State on some of that property, I wanted to contact an attorney to see if there was something like abuse of a corpse or whatever to look into it more.

So, I don’t know. Maybe he was lynched. Maybe he actually killed himself. Maybe my mom learned to shut it out and shut down. Maybe she knew why he did it and never wanted to tell me, or maybe she knew things were going on. Maybe he couldn’t find a job or feel like he could be the provider. Maybe he left a note that she never showed me. I have no clue. Either way, the South killed him.

Now, I do know that one of the ladies that she worked for helped her dig into it and got her some money. She dug into it and got his Social Security money after he had been dead for years. She’s the one that got my birth certificate because my mom didn’t really have a birth certificate. So she got the birth certificate and then got my mom the money. And she’s actually the one that got my mom a telephone at our house. So, as far as having prejudice, I’m not prejudiced because I know that a lot of white people helped my mom. Even if I’m in an unpleasant or toxic situation, I can deal with them until I can move on. And I’ve learned to do that, and I guess that’s it.

I didn’t know my grandparents on either side. I have no idea. I never met them. Now, some of my mom’s family, I know names, but I don’t know them. And they’re just names that you heard growing up. Because my mom was originally from Pulaski and Columbia down further South. And I don’t know at what age she came to Nashville, or if Nashville was her first stop before she met my dad.

In our neighborhood, everything was pretty much within walking distance. You’d walk to school, walk to the little corner store. My mom’s sister had a garden where she grew vegetables, and I actually grew up about a half a mile away from Fisk University. I grew up in that neighborhood. In fact, we used to trespass and cut through Fisk to get to our high school over by the railroad tracks. But, you know, we didn’t worry about trespassing. That was a shortcut. And we didn’t really pay that sign a whole bunch of attention because we were going to high school and we thought we knew everything.

Florence’s father, Clarence Morbley’s, death certificate. Note the stated cause of death.

When I went to elementary school—which the name has changed now, but it was called Wharton—I lived across the street from the school, so that was easy. There weren’t any school buses that were in our neighborhood. Public transportation, the MTA … if you were Negro, you sat at the back of the bus. And the little burger place, Krystal’s, you couldn’t eat in Krystal’s or Woolworth’s. Krystal’s would sell you food to-go and Woolworth’s had an old-fashioned counter, but you couldn’t sit there. There were water fountains in all of the public places downtown, and they were labeled colored and white. It appeared to be the same water.

I had my daughter at 18, so I became a single parent at a young age. My mom and I still lived together because I was still in high school. And I had a baby and dropped out. I did get my GED years later. And when my daughter was three, my mom lost her eyesight due to diabetes. I do know that diabetes and cancer both run in my family on my mom’s side. That’s about all the history I know about that side.

That’s kind of where my life started with bad marriages, bad choices, and everything else. However, I’m still thankful that I have what health I have and the strength to still work—some by choice because I enjoy it, and some out of necessity because I need the funds.

At age 71, I was just very thankful to have found a company that is hiring seniors, because a lot of companies.… I mean, I have a couple of friends younger than me, and they have lots of skills, but most of it is technology stuff. And some of them are still having to work temp services because of the job market. So I have a full-time job with benefits, and that makes me feel happy each day when I wake up, because there are a lot of people that don’t have that. The offices I clean at Fisk, they really treat me like a human.

As a young girl, I guess I didn’t know the rules of segregation. One day, I went into Krystal’s on a cold, snowy day. And there was a stool at the counter. Being young, how young I don’t know, I went and sat on that stool. But before my bottom could hit the stool real good, my mom kind of picked me up by the hood of my coat. She said, “You can’t sit there, we got to get our food to-go.” I remember getting the Krystal’s, and her explaining to me that we couldn’t sit in there.

I wasn’t a part of the sit-ins and protests because during that time, my mom and her sister tried to keep us away from that type of stuff. We didn’t get to like ride the bus and go downtown and protest or anything, during the time that everybody was standing up for our race. And I remember one time around Christmas, the organizers wanted the Black people to not spend their money downtown at the store that wouldn’t let us sit down and eat. They were standing in front of the stores to make sure that other Black people didn’t support them. And I remember my mom telling me, “Christmas gonna be a little different this year because we can’t shop downtown. They boycotting.” So we didn’t support the white stores.

When my mom would clean white folks’ houses, I would go, but most of the time when I went I had to sit in a set seat. And I had my coloring books and my paper dolls. But when I got maybe like 14 or 15, there were things she would let me do, but they were very limited. You know, she might say, “You can run the vacuum in this room here.” She would limit it to protect me.

Most of the time when my mom cleaned their houses, she cleaned in the daytime and they weren’t there. I remember one of the families had dogs, and they were mean dogs. They would bite. I remember she said that when she found out that the dogs were scared of the vacuum, she would turn the vacuum on when she first got there, and that kept them quiet and away from her.

Some of them got very picky. Some of the work she got was from running ads in the paper: “Day work wanted.” And people would look in the paper and call her. You could run an ad in the Tennessean, and that was how she got some of the jobs. She would try to get regular clients, and we would always get a better place to move to when she secured regulars. Occasionally, somebody that she met knew somebody that had a better place than where we were staying. So, it was always associated with her job because we would upgrade from where we were.

There was a lady in the neighborhood that kept the kids. She had nine children herself and was a stay-at-home mom. She was at home all the time. So that was where I would go before and after school. And then anybody in the neighborhood whose parents weren’t at home, that needed to stay there, could. Many times, my mom and I, we spent the night there. My mom got out late at night, so we would just stay. If you needed her, she was at home.

Florence’s uncle’s draft registration card.

It was a very close neighborhood, and people really did look out for each other. The generations before them always paid it forward. If people had a garden in their backyard and they needed tomatoes, the neighbors could come over and get tomatoes. Somebody else may have green beans, and they’d say you can come over and get your green bean. They always kind of shared with each other.

When did you realize that you were Black?

Well, the first time I realized I was Black.… In Nashville, there is a public housing area called Cheatham Place. At the time, it was 100 percent white. My mom and I were walking through the neighborhood, going to the Dairy Dip to get some ice cream, and a little boy about seven years old hung his head out the window and yelled in a singsong voice, “Nigger, nigger, nigger!” And I yelled back, “Your mama, your mama, your mama!” And my mama slapped her hand over my mouth to muzzle me. We didn’t go back that way. We walked back home another way.

It made a difference to me. I knew there were white people because my mom worked for them. Before then, I had figured that the ones she worked for must have accepted the fact that she was Black and needed a job. So I guess I didn’t ever get the point of racism. Not liking people that’s not your color makes no sense. We’re all human.

Did you ever feel limited growing up in the segregated South?

I didn’t know I was being limited until I realized that some of the textbooks we were getting were textbooks that had been checked out before. You might get a textbook that four people already had checked out previously. And then, as I got older, I found out that those textbooks were coming from the white schools. So we were behind. But at the time, we didn’t know we were behind. I don’t remember ever getting a book where I was the first person to sign it out. It was always a used book from the white schools.

On integration:

Some of my friends got transferred to other schools. They got transferred to the white schools. By that time I had a baby so I wasn’t really in school, though.

Integration was bittersweet. I think if we stick together as the Black community, we would be stronger than the white community, and they would feel very inferior. However, on the other hand, we’re almost to the point where we almost have to be there at their protocol because they have control over so many things. If we don’t follow their protocol and play by their rules, we might not make it successfully. However, I remember when we first started saying “Black Power,” and making the little fist. We did that as teenagers just as a symbol of Black power. But if we think about it, what we were saying is, we got the Black power, but we’ve just got to put it together.

We can be doing well, but somehow, at some point in our navigating, the white man is always there to say, “Not so fast. You got one more hurdle to go.” I realized that they just couldn’t leave us alone. I wish they could meet us halfway and work with us. I think integration was a good thing in some ways, but then, I think that it was a way—in the long run—to control things more heavily from a white perspective. So now, they’ll let us come and sit down and eat, but they would control how many could come, what time you can arrive, what time you can leave … all of this is by their laws. So, it’s still a control thing. They offered it to us, but at what cost?

But I say don’t let anybody second-guess you because you are Black. Because, at the end of the day, when a Klu Klux Klansman goes to bed and closes his eyes, he’s the one that’s got to lay down at night with what he did. To me, why are they covering their faces? If you are real about what you believe in, show me your face! If I put something on my face and cover up, you’re going to call the police and say I’m trying to rob you. Now, they’re still around, but without the sheets.

I believe Dr. King’s dream is possible because I believe anything is possible. But it’s possible with time. And you have to build it. And that’s what we’re doing. We’re building it. So yes, I believe it is possible. Yes.

What would your message be to African Americans in the future?

I would say be strong. And never give up.