Currie: First of all, let me tell you how excited I am to be doing an interview with you. I think it's going to be an adventure. I'd like to start with talking about your childhood—where you were born, what year.

Payne: All right. I'm a native of Chicago. I was born on August 14, 1911, and I grew up on the southwest side of Chicago. We lived in a community which was known as Englewood, and it was a very homogeneous place. When my parents first moved there shortly after the turn of the century, it was a mixed neighborhood, but gradually it changed and became predominantly black. But it was surrounded; it was sort of an island in the midst of a white sea, so to speak. And roughly speaking, it was bounded by 63rd Street on the south, and 59th Street on the north, and west by Loomis Boulevard, and east by Aberdeen Street. So within the confines of that, you had a tight little community, and it was a very solid community, and it was very closely knit.

Currie: How would you describe the people who lived in Englewood?

Payne: They were very ordinary people, but good, solid people. I like to think of them as the good burghers, you know. They had a sort of real stern consistency about their work and routine. There were four churches that dominated the area. One was a Baptist church, one was a Methodist church, Methodist-Episcopal, the other one was another Methodist church, and then there was a Presbyterian church. And you could almost tell by the names of the families which church they belonged to.

Currie: How is that?

Payne: Well, the Presbyterians tended to live in the area of Loomis Boulevard towards 59th Street; the Shiloh Baptist people lived on May and Aberdeen, those streets, Elizabeth Street; and then the AME people, the African Methodist-Episcopal church, was Throop Street and Ada Street, and some parts of Loomis Boulevard. So it was almost, you could see, but there was a co-mingling of the people, and you knew—you knew the families. You knew them very well, even if you didn't always associate with them, but you knew the families by reputation.

Currie: And which church did your family go to?

Payne: Well, we were African Methodist-Episcopal, and I'm probably the fourth or fifth generation. My grandparents, who were slaves, after the war migrated from Bowling Green, Kentucky, to Evansville, Indiana, and they settled there. And my grandfather was a waiter in one of the hotels, and they had nine children, but they took in other relatives, because after the Civil War, former slaves were searching for long-lost relatives. And so some came, and they stayed permanently, and that was the start of the extended family among blacks. So my grandparents were known in the

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Evansville area. My grandfather was George Washington Austin, and he was quite a character. They also were married in the little church down there, and their names were inscribed on the cornerstone.

Currie: Your parents were married in the church?

Payne: No, my grandparents were married in the church—George and Josephine Austin. She was Josephine Taylor. And they were the first couple married in that church, and their names are—I've never been to Evansville, and I think I should go. [Laughter.] But that was the St. James AME church.

Then at the turn of the century, my uncle, one of my uncles moved to Chicago for work, and he thought it was a good place to be. So my mother, who was the oldest girl, followed. She came up to work. I don't know where she worked; in some household, I guess. But my mother was a very scholarly person. She was known as a Latin scholar, and she taught briefly Latin in the high school there.

Currie: How did she learn Latin?

Payne: In the high school, in the colored high school. They had some very fine teachers, some very fine teachers, and they put great emphasis on the classics and Latin studies. She was very good at it, and so after she finished high school, then, for a time, she didn't really have a formal college education, but she did teach Latin for a brief time.

Currie: Did she teach when you were a child?

Payne: No, no, no. She had married my father. She had met my father, who at the time was—he was from Memphis, Tennessee, and he had come to—there was a great migration of blacks at that time, coming to look for work in Chicago. And they came up on the Illinois Central Railroad, and well, there was just a flood of them coming into the city. Some continued on to Detroit and other places, but Chicago got the bulk. My father worked in what they called a tannery, for curing hides, part of the stockyards, Chicago stockyards. But he didn't like that work too well, and so then he began railroading, which was quite an occupation then for blacks.

Currie: What would he do?

Payne: Pullman porter. So he remained in that capacity until his death.

Currie: You say that was quite an occupation?

Payne: Yes, because the job opportunities were so limited to the classifications for blacks. There were three types of jobs that were considered above normal and carried a little prestige with them, and that is if you worked in the post office or if you worked on the railroad as a waiter or a Pullman porter, and the third classification was if you worked as a messenger for an insurance company, one of the big insurance companies. So that gave you a little added status. The joke was that you found more master's degrees and sometimes Ph.D. degrees in the post office than you did any place else, because blacks who went on to higher education and earned degrees couldn't find work elsewhere, so they gravitated to the post office.

Currie: Was your father a scholarly man?

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Payne: No, no. My father probably had just an eighth grade education, but he was very hard worker, very family oriented.

Currie: And your mother, did she work?

Payne: No. My mother didn't work, because my father didn't like that. In those days, men liked to feel that they could take care of their families, so even if you had a rough time of it, they felt it was more important for the wife to stay at home and take care of the kids. They boasted about that; they felt proud that they could support a family, even if it was the lean, hard times, you know. That was just a credo among them. So my mother did not work, and she stayed at home and kept the house. She was very stern, a very strong woman, and you know, she really ruled the house. [Laughter.]

Currie: How did she rule the house?

Payne: Well, she made most of the decisions about, you know, the kind of clothes we would wear. And church, church, church—oh, she was very strong on church. And my father, because of his work hours and everything, was not that much church oriented, but I remember that sometimes when he'd come in, he'd be very tired, and if it was a Sunday morning, he would say, "I'm going to sleep in."

And my mother would say, "No, you're going to church." [Laughter.] The church was right across the street. And he would grumble and complain, but to church he would go. [Laughter.] He was a big, strong man, he was very jolly, and I have pleasant memories of him, but he died when I was about 12 years old. So I don't have too lasting memories, like my older sisters do, but I remember him as a very imposing figure.

I was very mischievous, so they said, and I remember that one Sunday morning, when he came in, my mother had made him go to church, and she left word with one of my older sisters to start the dinner, Sunday dinner, and a stern warning to me to stay with her and not get into any trouble, and then as soon as the dinner was started, the two of us would come on to church. Well, what happened was, earlier my father had brought home—he had them in a brown paper sack. I'll never forget it. He brought home two puppies that he'd acquired somewhere along the way, and they were bull puppies. And one was female, and the other, male. So my brother and I, who were the ones who—I only had one brother—and we just loved dogs, but we didn't have dogs, because my older sisters didn't like them. So we were delighted for these puppies, so we named them Jack and Jill, and we started to train them. And Jack was big and clumsy, he was just too fat, and he was big and clumsy. Jill was small and lean, and she was very bright, and you could teach her all kinds of tricks and everything. We just had a lot of fun with her. Well, my father had a cardinal rule that on Sundays, if the family was away at church, the dogs were to be kept locked in the basement. [Laughter.]

So this Sunday morning. my sister was in the kitchen, and I was sitting out on the back steps, bored because I had to go to church. I didn't want to go to church. So I just decided to let the dogs out for a romp in the yard, in the back yard. And oh, they were so happy to get out. Well, they found a bone in the back yard, and they began fighting over the bone, and Jack grabbed Jill by the throat and wouldn't let go. And so I rushed out, and I was pulling Jack by the tail, and the neighbor next door heard the commotion, and she came, and she got a pail of water, and she threw it on

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them. He was still—poor little Jill, she was just dying, he had her so, and he wouldn't let go.

So the only thing that I could think of to do was to go and get Papa. So I dashed across the street, and the church door was open, and I ran up the steps. The minister, Reverend Johnson, was just about to begin the sermon, and I saw my father nodding, and my mother was tapping him with her fan. [Laughter.] I rushed downthe aisle, and I whispered to him, I said, "Papa! Papa! Come home! The dogs are killing each other!"

Well, my father, who was asleep, woke up, and said, "Confound it! Didn't I tell you to keep those damn dogs locked up?" [Laughter.] Well, it was so hilarious. [Laughter.] It just broke up the service. So my mother was mortified. My father jumped up, and he ran across the street. We dashed across the street. He was a big man, so he just picked up the dogs and shook them good, and Jack let go. He said, "We're going to get rid of those damn dogs." [Laughter.]

Currie: Did he?

Payne: Well, he made us give away Jill to a cousin, and my brother and I cried all afternoon, all Sunday afternoon, we cried about that. He gave my cousin, who lived about three blocks away, took Jill, which broke our hearts, because we were fonder of her than Jack. But that was quite an incident. My father was quite a man.

Currie: You also mentioned you had only one brother.

Payne: Yes. There were six of us. The first three were girls, and then came my brother, and he was a sickly child. He was sickly from birth, and he grew too fast, so he was always frail. Then I was next after him, so I was number five. And then five and a half years later came my youngest sister. But my brother had a hard time because of his frailty. We went to school, Copernicus School, which was really three blocks to the north, and on the way, you know how boys will do, they get into rough-and-tumble fights, and he was always getting beat up. I just—oh, I just hated it. And I just took it upon myself to defend him, and I remember one time they came out of school, and they said, "Brother [we called him], Brother's in a fight!"

And I said, "Who? Who?" I tore out, you know, and I waded into this batch of boys, and I was just throwing them right and left. "Get off of my brother!" [Laughter.]

So he was so embarrassed, he said, "Go on home. Girls aren't supposed to fight. Go on home!" [Laughter.] But I was very protective of him, because I felt he just needed some protection.

Currie: Were you close to your other sisters?

Payne: Well, there was kind of a gap. Not necessarily, because they, you know, even three or four years, it makes a great deal of difference when kids are coming along. My older sisters represented the more sophisticated, and two of them were in college, going to City College, because there wasn't enough money to send anybody away. The oldest sister went to work for a very exclusive style shop on North Michigan Avenue. She stayed there for years.

Currie: What was a style shop?

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Payne: Well, in those days, they were more like a dressmaker's place. She used to sew for this exclusive shop on North Michigan Avenue, which was quite a thing, you know, and she liked it. She was a good seamstress, and she used to design clothes herself, and she wore fashionable clothes. And she had a lot of boyfriends. I remember that. She had a lot of boyfriends. So it was always fun to see her going out. But, you know, I was down the ladder a little bit, so I really didn't have that close rapport with my older sisters. They were just almost like one generation, and I constituted another one. So my friends were more in my peer group.

Currie: Your father was a Pullman porter, and your mother was basically a homemaker. What did men and women in the other families in Englewood do?

Payne: Many of them, there were very few women who worked, very few who worked. Most of the men were the breadwinners, and they either worked as janitors or maintenance people or the stockyards, you know, flourished in those days, Chicago stockyards. So many of them had jobs in the stockyards. That was one of the other categories I should have mentioned; it was considered to be a cut above just the routine. And most of them, that's what they did. They worked and the wives stayed at home. Sometimes the wives had some home occupations, such as some of them took in sewing, some of them were babysitters, you know, but home occupations were what they had.

My mother had a hobby that she turned into a pretty good occupation. She handpainted china. And I'll show you some of them later on. She did beautiful work. Incidentally, she handpainted almost up until the day she died.

Currie: How did she get into handpainting china?

Payne: Well, I think a neighbor who was doing it encouraged her to join a class, and she took it up, and she liked it, so she became quite skillful at it.

Currie: How did she turn her hobby into—

Payne: People began asking for these pieces, and at first, she was giving away pieces, and then somebody said, "No, Bessie." That's my mother's name. "Bessie, you should be getting some money for this." So then she began—she never did it on a large scale, but it was enough to bring in a little extra change. But she did beautiful work. Incidentally, she handed it down, the profession, down to one of her grandchildren, who became quite adept at it.

Currie: You would see her handpaint?

Payne: Oh, yes. She had a little kind of a kiln, I guess you'd call it, where she would draw on the figures. She liked fruits and flowers particularly, and she would draw the patterns, and then she would fill it in. She would bake it. [Tape interruption.]

Currie: She would paint the pattern and then fill it in. Did she have any formal training in this?

Payne: No, only instructions in the class that they took together.

Currie: And your father died when you were 12.

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Payne: Yes. Was I 12? It's been a long time ago, so I can't remember, but I remember that he was just 46 years old at the time that he died. And he died from a rare disease called erysipelas. I don't even hear of that disease now, but the doctors think that he got it from handling soiled clothing, soiled linen, on his runs. He had never been sick. I don't think my father had been sick a day before in his life. He was such a big, strong man. But he came home and he complained of this headache, and the swelling began. He had this terrible swelling, and it affected his throat and all of his lymph nodes and everything, just this terrible swelling. Finally, it just closed it off. Well, the minister of the church had a son who was a doctor and had just come out of medical school, and so he was the doctor. You know, that was back in 1928, I think, and penicillin, I think, was just—I don't know that it had even come. What do you call it, the thing that preceded it? It's another family of it. Sulfa drugs, they were called. So this doctor used that with my father, but it didn't really help, and within three days' time, he was gone. It was shattering not only to the family, but to this doctor, because he was so anxious to save this first patient. Had penicillin been in, he would have lived. They said later that had penicillin advanced, he certainly could have lived.

But anyway, oh, it was a profound event, so traumatic for the whole family, and it was my first real encounter with death, because people didn't die that fast in Englewood. I mean, we lived kind of sedentary lives, and you didn't see a whole lot of funerals, and certainly very little violence. And so death was not a thing that we really knew too much about. But when Papa died, it was quite traumatic. I remember I just couldn't deal with it. I just could not deal with the idea of death. I just didn't understand it. So I was so hysterical about it that a neighbor took me in and kept me, and I didn't go to the funeral or anything. I just couldn't deal with the idea of death; it was just too alien to me.

Of course, my mother was so very upset, because we had the house, the house had been paid for, but how was she going to cope with six children? The two older girls were ready to start in the Chicago public school system, but times were rough then. It was on the edge of the Depression, and the city was practically broke. They were paying teachers in scrip, you know, promissory notes, and it was worth only 80 cents on the dollar, so it was really a rough, rough time.

Currie: A scrip would be—they could redeem it?

Payne: Yes.

Currie: At stores?

Payne: Yes.

Currie: How did your mother cope with your father's death?

Payne: My mother was the most devout, religious person you'd ever want to meet. She just prayed, prayed, prayed all the time. We would have constant prayer sessions, and then sometimes she would go cleaning people's houses, you know, and get some money that way. My father had left a little insurance, not much. Then we got to the point where we took in roomers to help make ends meet, so we had to double up and triple up in the bedrooms. We had a big house, but we had to double up. So really, I don't know. I can't explain how she was able to do all that.

Currie: We're getting to the end of the tape.

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[End Tape 1, Side A; Begin Tape 1, Side B]

Currie: So you were saying your mother did a lot of different things to try to make ends meet, like taking in boarders. Did she ever talk about what she was doing or how she felt about it?

Payne: She would gather us around and say that we all had to be strong, and that we had to put our faith in the Lord. At the same time, she maintained a certain standard of social activity for us outside of the church. It wasn't the age of television, and radio wasn't even that great then. But we had a Victrola, and we had a few classic records, and she liked that and we liked it. She was one of the strong advocates of reading aloud, and so she emphasized that that was a way of family closeness, so we would take turns reading aloud from some of the classics. We'd go to the library and get the books.

Currie: Do you remember what you read?

Payne: Little Women was one of them. Little Women was a strong one, the Alcott books. And then Paul Lawrence Dunbar, who was a black writer and poet, we would read. Sometimes we'd have charades, and we'd act out some of his poems, especially one where he talked about—because he wrote a lot about pre-Civil War days and life on the plantation, and he did a lot of poetry on that. So sometimes we would just have little drama groups, and we would act out his poetry.

Currie: This was in your family?

Payne: Sometimes we'd have the neighbors in, and there was even a little church group that went in.

Currie: Is this where you first got your interest in reading and words?

Payne: My mother, early on, discovered that I had a flair for words and writing, and so she encouraged that. I went to Lindblom High School, which was eight or ten blocks away, and you had to cross the Maginot Line. We called Loomis Boulevard the Maginot Line. [Laughter.]

Currie: Why did you call it the Maginot Line?

Payne: Because that was the end of where black people were. And when you crossed it, boy, you were in all-white territory. And so you just knew that you were in a strange area. And when I started high school, we didn't have the money to ride the streetcar every day, so I had to walk it. I endured the taunts and the epithets and sometimes the rocks. Sometimes I stood my ground; sometimes I got a bloody nose from fighting. But that was the way it was. I had to walk through those lines to get to the high school. Lindblom was all white, except for a very few blacks. I think that affected my work pattern, my study pattern. I didn't do too well in high school, and I think it was because I was under stress and trauma all the time. I was a daydreamer.

But I had one outstanding thing: I was excellent in English, and I liked history. And I had an English teacher who saw something in me, and she encouraged me to write. She asked me to do essays, and she asked me to do little short stories. I did one that got into the high school newspaper, and that was quite an achievement, you know. It was about folk life.

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One day she said to me, when I handed in something, my handwriting wasn't that good, and she wrote back something in the margin. So when I went up to her, I said, "Miss Dixon, what did you write?"

She smiled, and she said, "Your handwriting reminds me of another pupil I used have when I taught in Oak Park, Illinois," which was an exclusive suburb. The star pupil that she had was Ernest Hemingway. So I was kind of flattered by the fact that she would compare my writing to Ernest Hemingway.

Currie: That's quite flattering.

Payne: Yes.

Currie: That must have given you a big push.

Payne: It did. It did. It inspired me.

Currie: Had you thought before that this might be an area that you were going to pursue?

Payne: No, because, you know, my ambition was to be a lawyer. I never thought about becoming a journalist or a writer. My ambition was to become a lawyer. I wanted to be a lawyer.

Currie: From the earliest days?

Payne: From the earliest days, that's what I wanted to be, because just as I was so fierce about protecting my brother, I had a strong, strong, deeply imbedded hatred of bullies. I just felt that if you're strong, you had no right to pick on weak people. My brother, I think, was the cause of it, because he was weak. You know, the guys—he was just a prime target. I just—ooh, I just hated that so bad. And I think that's really what led to my determination to want to be a lawyer, because I wanted to defend people. I didn't even think about being poor! It never occurred to me that I was poor, you know. So I said, "Well, I want to grow up and be a lawyer, and I want to defend the rights of the poor people." That's what I would always say. "I want to defend the rights of poor people."

But after my Father died and all the things that intervened, I knew that there just wasn't the money to go to college. The Chicago school system had a number of community colleges, and I frittered around those. I always felt like, well, that wasn't like a classic education. Besides, we had gotten together and we had decided among ourselves that one of us should go away to school, so we decided to send the youngest girl.

Currie: Why was she chosen?

Payne: Well, she was the baby of the family, and we said—well, by that time I was getting up to be 15 or 16, and we always said that Ruthie—we called her Ruthie—we would let Ruthie get a taste of life in college, you know, away from home. So we would all save up. I would work and go to work in people's houses, clean, and I'd put aside a little money, maybe a dollar. Maybe it was just a dollar or so, that was toward Ruthie's education, to give her a chance to go away to school. By that time, things were a little better, and the older sisters said that they would help send her away to school.

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We got a scholarship for her with a friend we knew. He was able to get a scholarship for her to West Virginia State University in West Virginia, and she went off to college. She's the only one in the family who went away to school.

Currie: So you helped her do that by cleaning houses?

Payne: Yeah, and the other sisters, they were the main source, but I did my little bit, my tiny little bit, towards helping her, too.

Currie: Was your mother working at the time?

Payne: She was doing her chores around the house, baking, handpainting china, occasionally going out to serve dinner for a family, a more affluent family.

Currie: And having the boarders.

Payne: Yeah.

Currie: That's how you were—

Payne: That's how.

Currie: Everybody in the family was doing a little something.

Payne: My brother, who didn't like school too much anyway, went to work as a messenger for one of the insurance companies, and he stayed there for years.

Currie: The decision was made to send your sister away to college. Then you decided to go to a community college?

Payne: Yes. Crane Junior College was one of the two-year colleges, and I went there for a while. I found it completely boring.

Currie: Why was it boring?

Payne: Boring because it didn't offer me enough incentive. It was just very mundane, I found.

Currie: What were you majoring in?

Payne: I was just majoring in English and history, the routine things that most people did. But I was always thinking of doing something else more creative. Then, like I said, I went to Crane Junior College, and then I shifted to a religious institution called Garrett—it was a wing of Garrett Biblical Institute.

Currie: Why did you change?

Payne: I shifted there because it was smaller, and I thought maybe that I could get more of a feeling of intimacy that I didn't get at—to me, Crane was just like a mill, you know, just grinding out people. It didn't really offer me much. So I went to this. But then I found that that was so overwhelmingly, pronouncedly religious, and it was so propagandized in a way, you know. It had a missionary touch to it.

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I always had questions about the missionary side of it; I thought it was a kind of patronizing thing. I stayed there. I got a little certificate from it.

Then I decided, "Well, I've got to do something." So I took an exam and I passed the civil service exam for the Chicago Public Library system, and I got a job as a junior library clerk.

Currie: What age were you?

Payne: Eighteen or 19, something like that.

Currie: What does a junior library clerk do?

Payne: File. [Laughter.] Stamp books, you know, and like that. Nothing great. Well, I stayed there and accumulated some—maybe six, seven, eight years of experience, but it was so boring to me. I was always being bored. I just wanted to do something more adventurous.

Then the chance came for me to go overseas. The war had ended, World War II.

Oh, let me go back and recap a little bit. To break the monotony, I left and I went to work—well, first—this is so long ago that sometimes I forget.

Currie: Well, since we have plenty of time, just spin it out.

Payne: For a time, I went to work. I put my age up. I was supposed to be 25, and I was only 21. I went to work for a juvenile girls' institution in Geneva, Illinois. This was a reform school for girls.

Currie: What made you want to work in a reform school?

Payne: Well, I just thought it would—you know, I have a very strong altruistic streak, and I thought maybe I could be of some help for these truant girls. I didn't know that they were hardened and tough. Oh, they were so tough! And they knew instantly that I was—no, wait a minute. I was just 20 years old when I went there. Well, they knew instantly that I was not that much older than they, so they knew that they were going to give me a hard time. And I tell you, that was an experience. Those girls, some of them were 15, 16, 17 years old, and they'd had experiences of people 40 years old or more—street hustling, prostitution, into drugs and things. But they put me to a test, and they would do all kinds of things to see how strong I was, and I was determined I was going to stay with it. Pretty soon I reached an accommodation with them, and they felt that I was really there to help them. But you know, it was too much for me, and my mother finally said, "Stop it. Stop it and come home." I was out there about a year and a half.

Currie: What was your job?

Payne: A matron in charge of a group of girls.

Currie: You were basically—

Payne: I was like a jail warden or something. That was a shattering experience, because I saw these young girls, and some of them were so tough and so hardened, and I

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just—you know, my heart just bled, because I felt, "What will they be like by the time, if they live to be 30 years old?"

Currie: What kinds of things did they do?

Payne: Well, they were brought in on all kinds of charges. I don't think there were any murderers among them, but some had been into robberies, and some had been into delinquency, you know, running away from home and living with men and so forth. Oh, just getting into all kinds of things—pot and reefers. You know, reefers and everything else. You know, we didn't know too much about cocaine at the time, but there was plenty of marijuana and substance abuse. So they'd lived hard lives crowded into their very young years; they had lived very hard lives. It was my, of course, basic hope that I could turn them around. They soon—some of them came to respect me, but I don't know how many lives I actually affected, because it was just too much of an experience for a young person who had been sort of sheltered, because I'd never had anything like that.

I came out there, and I went to work then for the Chicago Public Library.

Currie: So you came from the prison to the Chicago Public Library.

Payne: Yes.

Currie: And then you stayed there for eight years?

Payne: Yes, about eight years, I think it was.

Currie: Were you a clerk the whole time you were there?

Payne: I got a promotion to senior library assistant; that was a grand title, but it wasn't much more than I had been doing. A little salary increase. This was 1947, I think. In the meantime, in the community I had become a leader of sorts in all kinds of civic activities. One of the things was that—

Currie: Were you still living with your mother at that time?

Payne: Oh, yes. One of the things was that I was organizing people against selling off the invasion of—well, a big issue was the conversion of some areas of the neighborhood into commercial property, and particularly bringing in some taverns. I led a fight against that and organized the people. So people began to recognize I did have some leadership ability.

Then what occurred was that in 1947 there was a mass arrest of about 25 blacks. We had been on a picnic, and the Englewood Men's Club, I guess it was called, and we had come back, and the bus had discharged us at the corner of 60th and Racine. Across the street was this tavern. When we got off the bus, my sister was there, my younger sister was there, and when we stood there laughing and talking, and we noticed that the police were arresting people and throwing them into this paddywagon. We said, "What's going on?" So a couple of plainclothes men came across the street and said—he cursed us and used foul language. I said, "We're just coming from a picnic."

"Get the hell out of here! Move!" You know.

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So then, oh, I came back. I was furious! I said, "This is not Mississippi or Alabama! What do you mean?" Because I was talking back, he struck me with a billy club, dragged me across the street, and threw me into the paddywagon, you know.

And my sister screamed, and she said, "I'm going with her! I'm going with her!" And then there was panic. They really had almost a riot on their hands, because when the neighborhood heard, the people began pouring out of their houses. They said, "Ethel Payne's been arrested!" And so my older sister was married to a lawyer, one of my older sisters was married to a lawyer, and so I remember getting in this van, and screaming, "Call Rocky! Somebody call Rocky!" [Laughter.] And the van drove off with me in it. Oh, I mean, the streets just erupted, you know.

They took us to a police station about five or six blocks away, and when we came in, all these young men who had been arrested before were sitting around and some were being put into cells and everything. Oh, I was furious! I came in charging, you know. And so there was an elderly captain there, and he says in his Irish brogue, "Now what's the trouble?" [Laughter.]

So I told him, I said, "This is an abuse of citizen's rights." I was reading everything, furious. Well, the Illinois—what is it?—the Illinois Human Rights Commission, they had asked me to come on board. They had heard about my civic activity, and they had asked me to join the Human Rights Commission.

Currie: As a member?

Payne: As a member of the Human Rights Commission. I was the youngest member. So somebody called the governor, told him what was happening, and so when the captain really found out, then my brother-in-law came, he was ready to make bail, and when the captain—they hadn't locked me up yet, but they had all the women sitting. I was still storming. Oh, I was just so angry! And so this old captain came. He said, "Well, the boys got a little rough." [Laughter.] "They just went a little bit far, but you didn't do anything really wrong." So he said, "What can we do for you? We want to settle this now. Let's go home. Let's all go."

I'm ahead of my story, because this was a hot August evening when this happened, and when the word got around the area that I had been arrested and some others, my mother was sitting on the front porch, and it was a most remarkable thing. My sisters were screaming, "Why did she do it? Why? Oh!" They were just so upset.

My mother said, "Well, somebody get the bail money together." [Laughter.] This is my mother, my very religious mother, who was very calm about it! "Somebody get the bail money together." [Laughter.] So my brother-in-law came down. He was prepared to make bail, but it wasn't necessary.

So you know what I did? I insisted. I said, "You book me, because I want to go to trial. This is police brutality. You book me." I insisted.

The captain pleaded with me. He said, "Now let's just settle this. Let's go on home and have a peaceful weekend."

I said, "No, you book me. I want to be booked." So when I insisted on being booked, they had to fingerprint me, and about four other people stepped forward and said, "Well, we want to be booked, too."

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So he said, "Now what can we do?"

They booked us, and I said, "You let those people out of those cells downstairs, that's what you can do. You let those people out." So they did. They freed all the people they had arrested!

Currie: What did they arrest the people for?

Payne: Oh, I don't know. It was just excessive police use. It was just a claim that they were disorderly. There was no real charges against them.

Currie: Was that common?

Payne: Sure. Sure. This is police—this was where, you know, this had not really come into being yet, police-community relations. Sometimes you would get people on the force who just gravitated towards—well, they were sadists. They would, you know, at the slightest provocation, they wanted to go in and beat heads—what we called the head whippers. Most of the cops were mean, Irish cops, and they enjoyed going in with billy clubs and beating people over the head and throwing them in the jail, the paddy cells and taking them down to jail. That was a common exercise.

So I made quite a stormy issue out of it, and I might say that it was taken up at the Commission. And the governor did call—he said that he felt that there should be an investigation into it. Well, we went to trial about a month later, and that judge just threw the whole thing out. What do you call it—nolle-prossed the whole thing. He just threw it out. He said it was a clear case of excessive police force.

So I guess that was my first thing. In a way, I was carrying out what I would have liked to have been as a lawyer, you know, to really be an advocate for—

Currie: What other things did you do? You said you were on the Human Rights Commission and made quite a name for yourself. Can you talk a little about that?

Payne: Well. that and organizations to—I guess I liked to see civic improvement, and I just liked to see people get stirred up over issues, and people to exercise voting rights and all of that. So I was very heavily involved in civic activities.

Currie: Was there a civil rights movement at that time?

Payne: Not per se. Not per se. We had an NAACP, but it wasn't—see, it hadn't approached the fifties and the sixties yet. You see, that's when they began to really flower. But there was an NAACP, yes, and an active NAACP. We had quite a few terrible incidents to happen, but it didn't really get into that mass movement phase until later.

Currie: If we could go back just a little bit. In your family, were politics discussed?

Payne: My mother was a deep devout Republican, and I guess that was a carryover from the days when all blacks were Republicans. There hadn't been that great exodus from the Republican Party because they were still wedded to the philosophy of Abraham Lincoln, and he was their symbol. It wasn't until Franklin Roosevelt came in and the

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New Deal began to take hold, then you had a mass movement from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party.

Currie: Did your mother ever work for a Republican candidate?

Payne: Yes. My mother at one time was a precinct captain. Yes, she was active at the local level.

Currie: Did you talk politics at your house?

Payne: To some extent, yes. We talked about—my mother was not very much a revolutionary. [Laughter.] She accepted the system, and she just felt that you had to work within the system. Already I was beginning to have the seeds of rebellion churning up in me, and she always said, "Well, now, we have to just adjust, and we need to have a lot of prayer for our—"

[End Tape 1, Side B; Begin Tape 2, Side A]

Currie: You said your mother thought that "you need to work within the system."

Payne: Yes. She felt this was the law-abiding thing to do, you know. She just didn't want any of us to get into trouble, and breaking the law was just not the thing to do. She held such firm beliefs in that, that she used to lecture to—let me go back a little bit and say that behind us, in the block that we lived in, the 6200 block of Throop Street, was a row of houses that were like little crackerbox tenement houses, four to a unit, wooden houses. And the class of people that lived there were what we called the low-lifers, because they did a lot of gambling, and they did a lot of drinking. I know of no time of there being a drug problem. But you know, there was a peculiar thing. There was a class line there, because the people who lived on the row—we called it the row—had respect for the people who lived across, see, the church-going people.

Currie: The church-goers.

Payne: Yeah, yeah. We were a little better. Instead of being resentful and hostile, they kept their distance, and they respected us, and they particularly respected my mother. My mother was very strong, a religious person. I remember one time, my mother went out into the alley, and somebody had thrown some debris and some garbage or something over there, and my mother was trying to keep the yard neat and everything, and she spoke up very loudly, and she said, "Now, I respect your rights, and I think you ought to respect mine."

She started lecturing, and these people came out on the back porches and stood there and said, [whispering] "Mrs. Payne is angry. Mrs. Payne is angry. Mrs. Payne is angry." And finally, one of them said, "Yes, ma'am, Miss Payne. Yes, ma'am, Miss Payne. We won't do that anymore." And then pretty soon, they came and they swept up all that trash and stuff. So my mother had a presence; she had a formidable presence in the area. Of course, she was known as a very decent person. When she took a stand on certain things, on certain moral issues, people listened to her.

To show you how strong that was, there were some brothers—we called them the Asberry brothers. I guess they were real tough; they were into a lot of things. As I said, I emphasized that I don't know any incidents of drugs in that area, but I remember that one of my best girlfriends was named Ruthie Turner. Ruthie lived over in the 6000 block of Racine Avenue, and I lived at 62nd and Throop. So that meant

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that there was a distance of about four blocks. She came over one afternoon and stayed, and then it was getting dark, so I said, "I'll walk halfway with you." So we started out walking, and we were talking. We were so absorbed in what we were talkin about that we didn't notice this car pulling up beside us. We looked around, and there was a car full of white men. Well, that was strange, you know. And they pulled up close to us. I just stood there and looked and wondered what was going on, you know. One of them started out of the car, and before we knew anything, the two Asberry brothers appeared, and they grabbed those guys and just started punching and pulling them, and they jumped back in the car. I remember the brothers were still beating them as the car drove off. And Ruthie and I stood there. We were astonished I don't think it sunk in until the incident was over, but that car raced off. The Asberry brothers just tipped their caps and walked away, and they never said a word to us. But instantly they had come to our rescue. So, you know, that's an example of the kind of thing, the kind of rapport that existed between the one group towards the other.

Currie: Were they protecting you?

Payne: They were protecting us.

Currie: Interesting. I know in a memoir you gave me, you talked about your grandfather being very active in politics.

Payne: Yeah. Oh, Grandpa was.

Currie: Did that have an effect on you?

Payne: I think it did. Grandpa had an effect on me in two ways. He was a political activist, and he was also a great storyteller.

Currie: Did he often tell you stories?

Payne: Yeah. He just had—oh, he just had endless stories. My greatest regret to this day is that we never recorded those.

Currie: What kinds of stories did he tell?

Payne: Some were folk stories, you know, stories from slave days. He talked a lot about the urge for freedom, and as a small boy, he was too young to become a soldier, so he ran away and became a waterboy for the Union Army in that area. But he talked about the way slaves used to get together and sing songs of freedom and so forth, and how he met my grandmother and how they hid in caves and everything because they wanted to escape to freedom. And although he said he had a kind master, he was not abused, but the longing for freedom was very strong, very, very strong. And so he used to talk about that, and he used to talk about his experiences after he left Bowling Green. He and my grandmother got married, and they moved to Evansville, about life in Evansville, how it was very staid and precise, and the hotel where he worked at. He could tell all kinds of funny—he had a very wry humor, and he could tell funny stories about, you know, how the kids would set traps for the mean old proprietor of a store, for example. They would get firecrackers and set them off, you know, and he'd run out of the store, and sometimes somebody would run in and get some candy or something. Of course, he said that he got a whipping for that, because his mother didn't believe that; that was against the ethics and everything. He used to tell funny stories.

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He was talking about the Union soldiers and how they liked to drink and carouse and everything, and how he used to sit behind and watch them in their activities, and how they'd bring women along. There was always a troupe of women that would follow the army. As the army moved, there were women who moved with them, either for immoral purposes or whatever, you know. And he'd talk about that.

He was almost a spellbinder in his recollection of things. He had a very sharp memory. I remember one evening when it was so very hot, and, of course, we didn't have air-conditioning. My mother just spread some pallets on the front porch and let us sleep out there, and Grandpa and the neighbor down the street, who was just about his same age, they sat there on the porch. He was living with us at the time. They told one tale after another; they were matching each other. So finally at midnight, Mr. Spencer rose and he said, "Brother Austin, you win." [Laughter.]

Currie: This was your mother's father?

Payne: Yes.

Currie: He was very involved in politics?

Payne: He had been in Evansville. He moved to Chicago, I guess, about ten years after my mother came. He and my grandmother moved to Chicago. He took a job as a custodian in an apartment house, and they lived there for quite a long time. Then when they got older, he and my grandmother moved in with us. They had their own space upstairs.

Currie: Going back a little bit, you had become very much of a community activist when you were working at the Chicago Public Library.

Payne: Yes.

Currie: You were on the Human Rights Commission, which was an appointment by the governor?

Payne: An appointment, yes, by the governor.

Currie: You must have been pretty well known.

Payne: Well, I was beginning to get well known because of my activity, and I guess I had a little leadership ability, too. [Laughter.] You know, to organize people.

Currie: Also you said you had wanted to become a lawyer.

Payne: Oh, yes, that was a burning desire.

Currie: Did you ever—

Payne: Well, I applied to the University of Chicago Law School, and they just weren't taking people. Of course, my academic record wasn't that high. I admit that. But even so, had it been high enough, they still just weren't taking blacks into the law school at that time. Archibald Carey, Jr., became, I think, one of the first blacks in Chicago to enter the university law school. But the university was a very closed, very exclusive institute. Later, my sister did go, took her master's degree at the University of Chicago.

Page 16

Currie: Which sister was that?

Payne: That was my second sister.

Currie: So did you try other ways to go to law school?

Payne: No, I put it aside, because I'll tell you what happened. My mother kept pounding away—well, not pounding, but she was pressing me. She said, "You know, you have a talent for writing. You've been good. Now you must concentrate on that. You must use it. You must use this talent." And so she encouraged me to write.

Then in 1948 came the opportunity—like I said, the war had ended, and then the occupation had moved in. You know, the occupation of Japan. And so the Red Cross had been conducting the recreational function for the armed services. Red Cross pulled out of that function in order to concentrate on disasters, and then they set up what they called Army Special Services. And they were advertising for hostesses to go to certain points and take over recreational duties. Well, that sounded like an adventure to me, and I wanted to get away.

Currie: Did you read about it?

Payne: I read about it in the paper, and I called the Red Cross, and they gave me the information. Then I applied for it at the federal courthouse, I think it was, and got accepted. Of course, you know, the units were very much segregated. The Army was very much segregated. And so I knew in advance that I would be going into an all-Negro unit. So the offer was for Tokyo, Japan, and I said, "Oh, that's a chance for me to get to travel."

So I came home, and I called the family together. We used to have family councils. I told them that I had decided that I would go. My older sister, my very oldest sister, said, "Why can't you settle down? Why can't you settle down?" She had married by that time. "And be satisfied. You've got a good job with the Chicago Public Library. Why can't you be satisfied with that?"

And so my mother sat quietly, listening. Finally, she said, "Well, she's been raised to know the difference between right and wrong, and she's been raised in a religious atmosphere. At this point in time, I think it's up to her to decide what she wants to do with her life. So if she wants to go, she has my blessing." That's what my mother said. So I left with that.

Currie: What an adventure for you! Had you ever been out of Chicago before?

Payne: Oh, I had made a few little trips, you know, maybe to visit cousins and things like that, but nothing exciting. So I signed on, and I went to Oakland, California, and boarded a ship. I had a boyfriend who had asked me to marry him, and I said, "Well, I think I'd like to do this."

He said, "When are you coming back?"

I said, "I'll come back in a year." So I left him at the dock. [Laughter.]

Currie: Can you tell me a little about the boyfriend?

Page 17

Payne: Well, he was a nice young man. Very routine. He worked in the post office, and he was not particularly, you know, dashing or anything like that. I would have been a routine, you know—it would have been a marriage, maybe a good marriage, but it wouldn't have been exciting and full of adventure. But he was a nice young man. I did have the idea that I probably would come back and marry him, but actually, it was three years later. Of course, by that time, he, you know—

Currie: Had you thought about marriage in your life?

Payne: Occasionally. Occasionally. I hadn't really given it a serious thought because my mind was so much on adventure. I wanted to have an exciting life, a challenging life. I just didn't want to be caught in the humdrum routine, you know, of just—Englewood was a solid bastion of God and patriotism and all the rest of it, but I just didn't want to be caught up in that cycle. I wanted to do something.

Currie: The Japan job offered an adventure.

Payne: An adventure. And I got it! [Laughter.]

Currie: Well, let's go back a little bit. What were hostesses supposed to do?

Payne: Hostesses ran the club. They had a recreation club on the base. This is on the Tokyo Quartermaster Depot. And hostesses were supposed to provide recreation, preside over recreation, organize recreation after hours for the troops. That was their function.

Currie: Would that mean games, entertainment?

Payne: Games, entertainment, movies, you know. Well, much like the USO. You had a little budget for refreshments and the rest of it. And then we kept it busy, because under the occupation, they had to provide some work for the Japanese. Some of them were ex-soldiers. Times were hard for the Japanese, very, very hard. And so this provided some employment for them.

Currie: This was a segregated unit?

Payne: Segregated. The Tokyo Quartermaster Depot was the supply point for the whole of the Far East, and, of course, General Douglas MacArthur was the Supreme Allied Commander, and his headquarters were in Tokyo. We were on the outskirts of Tokyo, at a place called Shinagawa. But that was the main supply point.

Currie: What were your feelings as you got on this boat to go to Japan.

Payne: It was a troop ship that carried us over, and a lot of dependents were on board, going to join their husbands. We had to share a stateroom with some of the dependents. Of course, you know, they were careful to see that you were assigned according to race. I met some wives. Some of them were very nice, but some of them were just—they just weren't my type. You know, they didn't have very much vision. And I started keeping a diary. One of them was quite irritable, and she was very unpleasant.

Currie: How was she unpleasant?

Page 18

Payne: Well, she was always complaining, and she was always making snide remarks, you know, that I thought I was better than the rest of them. Her husband was a sergeant; she was going to join him. But she just grumbled about everything, so I wrote some notes. One day I came back, and she said, "You said all those nasty things about me."

I said, "What nasty things are you talking about?"

She said, "Well, I read your diary."

I said, "Well, if you read it, that was an invasion of my privacy, and if you read it, then you just let the shoe fit, because you had no right to read my diary. That's my private business."

"Well, do I really sound that—" She got very pitiful. "Do I really act like that?"

"Well," I said, "I wrote what I thought." She was very subdued for the rest of the journey.

Currie: How long did it take?

Payne: Going over it was about two weeks. Slow boat. Two weeks. And when we landed at Yokohama, there was a port of entry, and then we boarded a bus to take us to Tokyo. When I got to the depot and got checked in and got assigned to quarters, the worst earthquake in 36 years shook the island. I remember my experience of going through that and feeling the ground just moving, moving, moving under you, you know. It was over in a few minutes, but I said, "Oh, what a welcome. What a welcome." [Laughter.]

Currie: You wanted adventure.

Payne: I got it! I got it! [Laughter.]

Currie: What living arrangements did you have?

Payne: We had a house just a little ways removed from the main part of the base, and there were three hostesses who were there, but they were getting ready to terminate. They were going back. They were former Red Cross people, and they had been out in the area for maybe three, four years, and they were getting ready to go home. So I was coming on as a relief person. Then there was another woman who joined us, so we were all quartered in this one house. It was pretty nice. We didn't have cooking facilities, but we had Japanese-style showers, you know. and each of us had a room. So it wasn't too bad.

Currie: How did you feel about the work that you did?

Payne: Oh, I found it fascinating. I liked it. The GIs were rough-and-tumble kids, very young, most of them quite young, and it was a jolly good time we used to have. I remember that one of the dependents on the base had a little kid, and she couldn't pronounce my name, so she would call me Fanny, Penny, so I got to be known as Penny to the troops. So that was my nickname. So now, today, if I hear somebody call me Penny, I know exactly where it came from. [Laughter.] I have some friends in Seattle, Washington, and they still call me Penny.

Currie: What were the troops like?

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Payne: Rough, playful. They did as much with their recreation time as they could. They all had Japanese girlfriends, "moussimaes," we used to call them.

Currie: Moussimaes?

Payne: Moussimaes. [Laughter.]

Currie: How did they get that name?

Payne: Moussimaes was the Gls' nickname for the girls that they shacked up with. You know, I mean, it was a big occupation, so they called them moussimaes. I don't know what the derivative is. I've forgotten it. It probably means "my gal," or something like that.

Times were very lean for the Japanese; they were really going through some rough times. And so the GIs provided a great source of money and companionship. The regulation was against their marrying them at the time, but they moved in with them, and off the base they had their little huts and things that they lived in. It was quite a thriving thing, because that was a big base. So on payday, you know, it was get-away time, because the Japanese were all depending on that GI largesse. And they were quite generous towards their—what shall I say?—the enemy. You know, the old enemy. And they used to provide the kids with chocolate bars, and the kids got extra rations that they wouldn't have gotten ordinarily.

Do you know that in the three years' time that I was there, I noticed some profound changes in the physiological aspects of the Japanese. Used to, they were shorter, weaker. We used to call them bandylegs. The kids began to show a marked change in height, in leg, you know, and the physiognomy changed, because they were getting better rations, and it did, it showed up. Today you see quite a few tall Japanese that you did not see previously in that time.

Currie: And what did you do for fun?

Payne: For fun? Oh, occasionally we would get to dine out at the officers' club, because we took most of our meals there, or we'd go up in Tokyo to see a kabuki play, or we would form our own—oh, I formed a talent group among the Gls, to put on talent shows. That was a lot of fun. I just tried to mingle as much as I could with the population, the general population, because Japanese is a very difficult language.

Oh, the first day that I was there, after the earthquake passed, there were Japanese interpreters at the club, and I was assigned as jeep driver for the—

[End Tape 2, Side A; Begin Tape 2, Side B]

Currie: We got a little off of Japan, because we found this wonderful envelope of family memories.

Payne: I want to talk a little bit about Papa here. I'm reading from the family history as compiled by my sister Thelma Gray, who now lives in Los Angeles, California. Here's an excerpt, because this talks about my father. I should preface this by saying that my father died when—I think I was 12 years old. My older sisters were a little more removed and they had more experience with him than I had, so her perception of my father may be much broader than mine. And I like what she's saying here, and I'd like to read this.

Page 20

"Papa always seemed to have good health. He never complained and never stayed home from work. He nicknamed me the "boss," and when he threw his traveling bag in the door, he would say, "Where's the boss?" if I wasn't around.

He seemed to want me to take over some responsibilities. Mama, bless her soul, often misplaced her purse, so when we were making our first trip to New York City [he had a pass so they could go to New York City], he gave me most of the money. He taught me never to have all the funds in one place when traveling, and I practice that even today.

Papa lived to see me graduate from college and get established as a teacher. He was proud that this goal had been reached. During the next winter, Mama had to have her tonsils removed, and Papa, for the first time, said to my grandmother that he didn't feel like going out for this trip. He had contracted a virus infection, which moved so rapidly in the pre-penicillin days, that in five days he passed away. [I said it was three days, but it was five days.] Just the day before, I went up to the top of the stairs to peek at him. We were not supposed to go near him, for the doctor feared contagion. He asked me if I had taken care of the bills which he wanted paid. I said, "Yes," and he seemed satisfied. To the last, he was a responsible person looking at the needs of his family."

I'm so glad she did that, because that brings my father into focus even more.

Currie: She would have been older than you?

Payne: Oh, yes. She was old enough to take on some responsibilities, as she said.

Currie: What does that tell you about your father? You say it brings him into focus.

Payne: It brings him into focus as a man who cared deeply for the family and who was proud of his family and who yearned for them to have the best and yearned for them to have an education.

I like to think that my father would have been proud of me. He probably would have thought I was the rebel in the family, but he would have been proud of me.

Currie: And this comes from a wonderful resource over here you pulled out of your desk. I notice that you have family reunions.

Payne: We do. Our latest one was in St. Louis on the sixth of August. We were all gathered in St. Louis. We had three days of meeting and greeting new members of the family, a lot of little babies. [Laughter.]

Currie: Here is this family tree that goes on for pages and pages. So there are a lot of branches of your family.

Payne: Yes, yes, there is. It's called the Austin reunion, because the progenitor was Grandpa Austin and Grandma Austin.

Currie: This picture we just found is your grandfather?

Payne: Yeah. He's such a darling man.

Page 21

Currie: When you opened the envelope, you said—

Payne: Oh, yea. "That's Grandpa." [Laughter.] He was quite a character, quite a character.

Currie: Let's take a look at his picture. When you look at that picture, what do you think?

Payne: When I look at the picture, what do I think? I like to think what a wonderful thing it is to have a lineage that you can be proud of, and that you knew you had some good, strong roots, and it just becomes such a warm, intimate feeling to feel that you're springing from that. And so he just symbolizes so much to me.

Currie: We'll see, when we do the videotape, that he has quite a strong bearing.

Payne: Oh, yes. Yes. I'm so glad that I thought about this. Yes, this is a pouch full of family treasures.

Currie: Let me ask you, while we're sitting here, you mentioned that your mother was the one who kept encouraging you to write?

Payne: Yes.

Currie: During the years betore you went to Japan, or even while you were in Japan, had you tried to submit articles or do some writing?

Payne: No. As I said, the great thing was getting my story—oh, excuse me. I did get one piece sold in a magazine called "The Row Has a Wash Day." And it was a folk story about the two block. I talked about the quilting that went on in the back yard, how the women would sit out in the back yard and have quilt frames and stitch. And there was a little thriving business in liquor, you know, and once in a while there would be a polite raid that would go on. [Laughter.] And sometimes—

Currie: You mean illegal liquor?

Payne: Yes! And sometimes what would happen was that the women would be out in the yard quilting, and they'd hide the liquor under the quilt frames. So I wrote about that, and I sold that to a magazine. I don't even remember the name of the magazine. I think I got $25 for it, all of $25 for it.

Currie: That was in what year?

Payne: Way back.

Currie: Was that during Prohibition?

Payne: When did Prohibition cease? It was in Prohibition days, that's for sure.

Currie: That's why they'd be hiding the liquor?

Payne: Yes.

Currie: How old were you when you wrote that?

Page 22

Payne: I was still in high school. I was still in high school, yes.

Currie: And why did you decide to submit it?

Payne: I think that English teacher that I spoke about encouraged me to submit it, because I took it to her first. She said, "Why don't you try it for a magazine?" She thought it was worthwhile.

Currie: You don't recall which magazine it was?

Payne: I wish I could remember. Possibly when I start digging around some more, I'll find a copy of it, because in that closet there is so much stuff. Oh, my goodness!

Currie: How did you feel when they bought your article?

Payne: Oh! Well, I was the celebrity of the neighborhood because I had sold a piece. Yes, I was a celebrity. Oh! And it was passed around among the neighborhood, and I got a lot of praise. And I think the minister mentioned it in church.

Currie: And did you submit other things after that?

Payne: No. I don't remember doing so, but I had it in the back of my mind, you know, developing my writing.

Currie: You said you had done something for the school paper.

Payne: Yes.

Currie: Did you work on the school paper?

Payne: No. I just submitted an article. I remember now; it comes back to me. I wrote about Maxwell Street in Chicago. Maxwell Street was the Jewish section, the merchant section of Chicago. It was like the Ginza in Tokyo; it was just a solid area of merchants, and there was a certain air about it, a certain quality about it. It was really an adventure to go through there. So I wrote about that, and that appeared in the high school paper.

Currie: But you didn't think about trying to work on the school paper?

Payne: Well, I doubt if I could have, because I was only one of a handful of blacks in the school, in a school population, maybe, of 1,500 or 2,000 students. I mean, it just wasn't the code at the time. It just wasn't. So the fact that I had even had this accepted was really something.

Currie: These early pieces that you did, how did you know what to write and how to go about it?

Payne: I wrote because the subject matter appealed to me. I was fascinated by Maxwell Street, for example. I also liked—I thought the people on the row were like characters out of a book. They could have fit in John Steinbeck's novels; they could have fit into a Faulkner group. You know, they had a life of their own. They were people who had their own mores; they were people who lived their own lifestyles; who went about their daily lives in their own peculiar way and didn't bother anyone. Once

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in a while you'd have some fist fights or something, but you didn't hear this cutting and shooting and stabbing going on, you know, that you hear of today. They just lived their lives. I thought they had a lot of reliance about them, and I liked to just record what I saw.

Currie: Did you have anyone that you were trying to emulate, a model that you might have used?

Payne: The women who did the crocheting were fascinating to me, and their wash days, and the way they hung their clothes out. They took such pride, and the clothes were so clean, you know. And this great big barren yard and the clothesline stretching out. Every Monday was a wash day. Every Monday was the wash day—religiously. So that meant they had a sense of cleanliness, you know, and I think maybe there was a little rivalry among them to see which one could turn out the nicest wash, to dry in the air. Then the quilting was a recreational thing. It was a chance to sit and call up to, and you could smell the fish frying, you could smell meats cooking, and the banter that would go on from upstairs, you know, and downstairs, as the women sat in the yard and did the quilting.

Currie: And that just captured your imagination?

Payne: It really did.

Currie: How would you go about writing about it?

Payne: Well, I would sit and watch them and take notes, and then I would string them out into my particular word pattern and sentences. Sometimes I'd read them aloud to somebody in the family who was willing to listen. I would read aloud.

Currie: And did you get criticism from them?

Payne: Well, occasionally my mother would criticize something. It usually was on grammatical construction more than the content. I don't think she ever criticized what I was trying to say, so much as she wanted me to have it correct in punctuation and grammatical patterns and so forth. It's because she was very strict about that.

Currie: This may be repeating, but did you never thing about submitting other things?

Payne: Not at the time, because there really wasn't that much market for it, particularly for black writers.

Currie: You mean black writers would submit to different outlets?

Payne: Yeah, and there wasn't that much of a market. No, I guess I thought about it more as a recreational thing than trying to do it for money.

Currie: You mean as a black writer, you could submit to black markets?

Payne: No, no, no. I didn't mean that. I meant there wasn't much of a market—in the general market.

Currie: For black writers.

Payne: Yes.

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Currie: And those were the subjects that you were writing about.

Payne: Usually, yes.

Currie: It's interesting, too, that you come from a large family, but a large family of predominantly girls.

Payne: Yes.

Currie: With only one brother. Did you ever have a sense that there was a separate treatment of the girls and the one boy?

Payne: I think he did.

Currie: Really?

Payne: I think he did, because—well, he was outnumbered, so to speak. He was kind of sandwiched in. See, three girls came first, then him, and then two more girls after him, so I think he felt like he was, you know, a little pinched there, maybe, sometimes, by the dominance of women in the house, especially after my father died. Then his health was always frail for the rest of his life. He lived to be 50, but he still suffered from poor health.

Currie: Did you ever have a sense that there were things he could do as a man that you couldn't do as a woman or a girl?

Payne: Things that he could do as a man?

Currie: Yes.

Payne: No. No, I can't say that. I felt that I could go as far as I wanted to, even though I was a woman. I didn't feel that my sex inhibited me. In fact, I felt maybe a little superior to him because of his frailty. I confess that. He was a nice guy, but he wasn't strong and he didn't take strong positions like I did. So I didn't have any occasion to feel that he had more advantages than I did.

Currie: It was interesting, too, that when your family decided who was going to go away to college, it was your youngest sister and it wasn't your brother.

Payne: No. Well, in the first place, I don't think he had the inclination for higher education. The other girls, the second and the third sister, were the ones who entered the school system as teachers. Both of them went on to get higher degrees. Like my sister Thelma, who went on to the University of Chicago and got a master's degree in history. So I guess he felt that the education was for the girls and not for him. [Laughter.] Not for him. He was a nice guy, but he was very routine. I don't think he wanted to break out of that and do—well, he served his time in the war. He was in France. But I don't think other than that he had any great ambition, but to be a good citizen and a good husband.

Currie: Did your sisters all have ambitions?

Payne: To move ahead in the school system, yes. And me, well, I had ambitions just to see the world, you know, just go with the flow. [Laughter.]

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