Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2023/Fall/Section20/Martha Turner

Overview

Martha Turner was born around 1843 in Bladen County, North Carolina. She was half-Native American and half-white, and was raised by her father and stepmother. She worked for her father’s lumber business during her childhood. She met Joe Watson, a white man, and ran away to be with him when she was around 12 years old. She ended up in Wilmington, North Carolina, where she remained for the rest of her life. She worked at the Wilmington Cotton Mill for over 50 years until they closed. She moved in with her granddaughter once the mill shut down and supported them with her $14 pension in her later years.

Early life

Turner was born in Bladen County near the Cape Fear River around 1843. She was the oldest daughter of William James Lazans and Lelia Haddock Turner. Her mother was around 12 when she married her father. She had two sisters who died very young, and two brothers who grew up and ran away from home, and lived to be very old. Her mother was around 18 when she died. He remarried a woman who was cruel and made Martha work hard her entire childhood, which was amplified by her father's cruelty toward her.

Turner went to school for a short while, and she went from 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. for three months. During this time she also worked for her father and his lumber business with her two brothers. She cut and rolled wood, as well as helped hunt for food with a bow and arrows.

She met Joe Watson, a white man, when she was a teenager, and fell in love with him. This angered her father because he wanted her to marry a Native American. When her father caught her meeting with Watson, he beat her so badly that she was covered in blood. She decided shortly after that she was going to run away to marry Watson. She could not leave right away, so her father caught her again with Watson and beat her bloody again. A few days after that, she gave her father some money and told him that she was going away and that he would never see her again. She went to the river to catch the next boat, and waited three days for it to come. When the boat arrived, she went up to a man with a large family, Mr. Durden, and told him of her situation at home with her father, and he let her go with them. She left on this boat when she was around 12 years old. She arrived in Wilmington, North Carolina and lived there for the rest of her life.

A year after she arrived in Wilmington, Watson showed up. She had been a boarder at the Durden's house and was working at the Wilmington Cotton Mill. Watson began working at the mill as well. However, the two never married and Watson left shortly after showing up. Turner was left in Wilmington with his baby on the way. She felt ashamed, so she changed her last name to her mother's and named her son John William and not Joe Watson like she had originally planned. Despite his absence, Turner still loved Watson and hoped that she would meet him in heaven someday.

Adult life

The Durden's took care of her when John William was born, and he began to work at the cotton mill with his mother when he was nine. He married a woman later in life and they all lived in Turner's home together until Williams' sudden death at 53 years old. His wife did not live much longer. Turner was left with her granddaughter, Lottie Mae, who came to work at the mill as well when she was old enough.

Lottie Mae Yopp eventually moved out to Muddy Hollow just outside of Wilmington with her husband, John Yopp. Yopp passed due to a stroke just after the house was finished years prior, so Lottie Mae lived alone until Turner moved in during August of 1938. The mill itself closed down in 1932, but Turner was able to keep her house as long as she continued to pay the water and sewage bills. Because Turner was alone, her house began to fall into disrepair as she had no way of fixing it. This led her to leave her house behind.

Soon after she moved in with Lottie Mae, she contracted a bad case of gangrene in her foot. She was in the hospital for two months, and ended up making a full recovery despite the doctors believing she wouldn't due to her age. The nurses and doctors loved her, and she remembered the kindness she received more than the pain.

She had her own room in Lottie Mae's house. The entire house was sweet smelling and filled with plants and simple furniture. In Turner's room there was a rocking chair that she brought from her mill house. There also was a black marble clock and an engraving titled "The Greatest of These is Charity" hanging on the wall. The engraving was especially important to Turner because she remembered her childhood of only having animals for friends, which is depicted in the engraving. She also had a little oak dresser, an old photograph album, and a mahogany-painted iron frame bed.

The house in Muddy Hollow is surrounded by pine woods and well-kept fields, with an empty cow shed and a large vegetable garden. Turner felt comfortable in the country, and didn't mind the long walk to the bus station that she used to attend church. Turner was a very faithful woman, and many of her values came from the ones she learned in church: modesty, respect, and kindness being a few. Her only self-proclaimed bad habit was that she used tobacco, which she called "snuff," but she was very clean in every other part of her life. Turner was a consistent member of Castle Heights Church.

Turner's pension of $14 a month was the only reliable income the two women received since Mr. Yopp's death.

Social contexts

North Carolina During the Great Depression

North Carolina suffered greatly during the Great Depression. It was a largely agricultural state that had yet to industrialize before the stock market crashed, so it did not have the foundation to survive. It was also a poorer state on a national scale before the Great Depression began, so there was less to fall back on. Many people in North Carolina lost their businesses, their homes, and their farms. In 1930 alone, 88 banks in North Carolina closed; in comparison, only 98 banks closed in the state during the entire decade of the 1920s.

Cotton was a main crop grown and then taken to mills to export for profit in the state, but the Great Depression caused many mills to close. Many factors, including lower wages, merging of mills, and increased production all caused employees of mills to have to tend the machines at a faster pace. This pace was not sustainable, and because the cotton mills were a large backbone of the economy, the collapsing of them was not good. Also, the mills relied on labor from people of color and immigrants, which was becoming less and less available as many Black Americans migrated up to northern states for better opportunities and less racism. As labor became more expensive, so did the industry as a whole, which was not good for North Carolina's economy.

The positive impact of the Great Depression in North Carolina is that it allowed for rampant industrialization to begin as it was ending and even in some cases during it. North Carolina has access to many aspects necessary for industrialization: raw materials, markets, and transportation especially. Also, despite migration, there were still plenty of formerly enslaved people as well as poor white people who needed jobs that could supply factories. North Carolina had a large share of people who found they preferred working in a factory to sharecropping.

Racial Identification in the 1900s-1930s

People at the turn of the 20th century and well into the middle of it rarely reported their race accurately. From 1790 to 1950, census takers determined the race of the Americans they counted, sometimes taking into account how individuals were perceived in their community or using rules based on their share of "black blood". Especially in the South, where racism was more prominent and overt than in the North, many citizens tried to change their heritage or get away with being white. Many multiracial people that were half-white and another race that was not black would report only the white side of their family and not the other, which could work if they looked more white. In the 1930 census specifically, enumerators were told that a person who was both black and white should be counted as black no matter how small the percentage of blood, a classification system known as the one-drop rule. This type of classification system indicates that the censuses conducted in the early 20th century are skewed and biased. Even when asked to self-report, many people would report inaccurately to be perceived a certain way. Additionally, the Native American population had a blood quantum rule, which required members of tribes to have a certain amount of ancestry to be able to say that they were a member of the tribe.

Native American Tobacco Usage

Tobacco is an important part of many Native American tribes across the United States, and in many is known as a sacred crop. Tribes describe how tobacco came to be in different ways, with many having specific folklore or oral histories that point to how and why tobacco became prominent. There are several strains of tobacco, and many tribes use one that tends to have more mind-altering effects, especially in the eastern parts of the United States. Tobacco is largely communal, and in tribes could be passed around in a pipe to all members during meetings.

References

Davis, Anita Price. North Carolina During the Great Depression. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2003.

Godlaski, Theodore M. Holy Smoke: Tobacco Use Among Native Americans in North America. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky, 2013. Mitchell, Broadus. The Rise of Cotton Mills in the South. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 1921.

“Martha Turner” Interview by Frances L. Harriss, date December 20, 1938, Folder 507, Federal Writers’ Project papers NC-231, Southern Historical Collection, the Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Mitchell, Broadus. The Rise of Cotton Mills in the South. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 1921.

Parker, Kim, Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Rich Morin and Mark Hugo Lopez. “Chapter 1: Race and Multiracial Americans in the U.S. Census.” Pew Research Center. Pew Research Center, 2015. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/06/11/chapter-1-race-and-multiracial-americans-in-the-u-s-census/.

Walbert, David. Industrialization in North Carolina. LearnNC.