Miss Elizabeth: An Oral History

Mrs. Elizabeth Sanderlin, — “Miss Elizabeth”— as she is known around her home in Currituck County, North Carolina—is an unusual woman for her time and place. In a Southern Baptist community of farmers wives, she was a college-educated divorcee who worked outside the home, first as a teacher, then as part of the federal Work Projects Administration, created by Franklin Roosevelt to stimulate recovery from the Depression.

When “they turned the women off” from the WPA, as she puts it, she worked briefly as a restaurant manager and for many years thereafter as the county’s home demonstration agent. Now in her eighties, she remains a vital personality and intrepid traveler, unimpressed with herself and the many barriers she broke through with humor and grace.

I came the Depression, back to Currituck to live with in ’35, my during family. I was divorced then. I had a child died with appendicitis at three and a half years old. My husband and I were divorced about six months later.

Virginia Edwards, the home agent, came up to the house and said if I wanted some work to be up to the courthouse Monday morning, that everyone was going down there to register for work with the WPA. And of course I was bright and early down there and got a job working as a filing clerk. Then a new program was developed, Farmers Home Administration, and I went to work for that.

I was the home supervisor and Tully Williams was the farm supervisor. We saw the farm families who applied for loans in Currituck, Camden, Perquimans, Chowan, seven counties in all. There was a committee in each county set up of men. Didn’t use women then, they were all men, and that committee approved or turned down the loans. Tully made the farm plan — how much it took to operate the farm with. Then I had to make the home plan — how much it took to live on, financially. Then I taught them, if they didn’t know how to, to can food and live at home.

Two things we always got them was garden seed and a pressure cooker. Another thing was a milk cow. Over in Murfreesboro one man didn’t want a milk cow. His wife was dead, and he had to milk it. So he always called me “Miss Cow Tail” when I went up there. He was upset over that. “Miss Cow Tail,” he called me.

With a milk cow you could make American cheese. We used an old oyster can and thick piece of wood with holes bored in it. Then you let that milk turn to cottage cheese and put butter coloring in there, cheese coloring, and mold it. During Depression you couldn’t buy cheese. If you were going to have it, you had to make it. We canned sweet potatoes too. One woman in Perquimans County, every time she saw me years after said, “I’m still canning sweet potatoes.”

You just went into the home and did whatever was necessary. If the clothes lines and wood piles were in the front yard, we had to get them in the back yard. You’d want them to clean up the general appearance of their home. And fix broken-down door steps. So many legs were broken, crippled by broken down door steps. I hadn’t realized that before. So we were doing safety as well as appearance.

Then you tried to give them something to live for. I never will forget what our state woman said one time: If you went in a home and saw flowers stuck down in a fruit jar or something, always remember there was something nice about that woman and give her plenty of attention. Because she was trying.

A lot of people needed dental work, a lot needed glasses, some of them needed tonsils removed. We saw to that too. One man’s family needed five pairs of glasses. Five pairs in that one family. We drove up one day, Tully and myself, and all five of them came out to greet us, so proud of those glasses, you know.

It was interesting to see how things improved. I remember one family in Camden County, a black family. Their house burned. They had a large hen house and they were living in that hen house. The children were always upset and crying when we went there. But the woman was real smart, she just hadn’t had the opportunity. So we got her a cow and hogs and chickens, and she got to feeding her family and preserving and canning and those children were soon back in school. And several times after then when she’d see me she’d tell me what that had meant to her. And you could tell it from the health of her family. Every family didn’t do that well, but you don’t expect it.

A family I worked with, Claude Wright’s family, he had lost his wife but he kept those two children and I admired him for that. He did the best he could. But it was one of the worst houses — dirty, junky. He never hung anything up. I shouldn’t tell you this, but I went there, he was in the hospital, and I took his two children and we cleaned that house up. I took off a truck load of old magazines and old clothes. Stuff that needed to be thrown out I had no business doing that, but you get attached and I admired what he was trying to do. There was a hole in the floor and I covered that up to keep the cold air from coming through. And when I got home my second husband, Sam, said, “You shouldn’t have done that. That was his bathroom.” And sure enough when I went back he had taken that board up. It was his bathroom.

We mostly saw six or eight families a day. If you didn’t do anything but listen to their problems and their troubles, it released something. It did them good.

Twelve years I worked with the WPA. Then they turned the women off the Farmers Home Administration, after the Depression was over. One woman was all they kept on the payroll. I had borrowed $ 1,000 to buy a car one Saturday, and next week I lost my job. I thought, what in the world am I going to do to pay that money back? I was in Hertford and I called my husband and I said, “Sam, my job’s going to be over within 30 days, what am I going to do about my thousand dollars?” He said, “Well hush your crying and come on home.” Said, “You’ve never heard of anyone starving in Currituck in your life.”

So I came home and I sold Fuller brushes and cosmetics and paid my thousand dollars back. Then I went to work at the Carotoke Restaurant in Shawboro. I had a cook and a dishwasher and a waitress, and I was manager. It was a nice place for the community people, a nice meeting place for them, I mean. We were open breakfast, lunch and dinner, and Saturday night folks came in to dance. But it wasn’t enough business to operate. Johnny Etheridge said if I could get somebody to work like me, I wouldn’t have to be paying all these others, but you can’t find that. If a woman’s going to cook, she don’t want to wash dishes.

Years don’t mean a thing to me. Seems like it was ’45, but I’m not sure. No, it was’51. In ’51 I went to work as the home demonstration agent for Currituck County. Extension work. I did that for 18 years. Extension started in nineteen three or four, way before the WPA. But during the Depression people needed something else. The extension service didn’t lend money. The Farmers Home Administration did. They let people stay on the farm.

About the time I started as agent, Alma Roberts started writing for the newspaper. And she didn’t know how to condense at all, so she put everything in there. We had so many write-ups about things being done in Currituck — that did club work more good than anything else.

They’re called homemakers clubs now but they were called home demonstration clubs then because the county agent would go to the meeting and give a demonstration. I had 14 clubs throughout the county and a lot of them met at night. We’d demonstrate the different kinds of food you’d prepare or some sewing. We’d do household furnishings, refinishing furniture, upholstering furniture. When I started in ’51, the state wouldn’t let you do crafts. They thought it was a waste of time. But I did crafts anyway. I just didn’t put them in the report at the end of the month. Now the state’s paying people to go out and teach crafts. Times change. They do change.

We made mats out of pine needles, braided rugs, and Christmas decorations. Crafts have been a livelihood for a lot of women. Mattie Burgess sold her angels at the Christmas Shop in Manteo as long as she was able to make them. Her picture came out in one of the oil company’s magazines. She was using their Fluffo margarine cans. We had fashion shows too.

It was a good time. A good time to visit. And if you didn’t learn from the agent, you learned from someone else that night. And then so many people got up to speak. Not a year or two ago they called me to give a talk to the county commissioners. I said, “I can’t do it now. Last time I tried to talk I just gave out of breath”—being nervous and my age and all. And the woman who called said, “Will you give me some notes so I can do it?” And that night the first thing she told them when she stood up, she said, “Now I’m going to talk tonight but club work has allowed me to do it.” Said, “It has put confidence in me.” And that’s what I’ve liked to see. Women who developed.

I know one time I was talking to Miss Alice Scaff about going to church or going to club meeting. I told her I’d put church first because I think you should put church first and she said, “Let me tell you something, no you don’t. You put club first and train them how to talk in church.” That’s not right, that’s not the way I feel, but I think club work does train leaders for your community.

You still have a lot of women out there who are timid because they have never worked outside the home. They’re afraid to express themselves, they think they may be wrong. And every person is a special person. Each person — I don’t care who they are or anything about them — each person has something to give, and if you pull it out of them or help them find it, then they develop. Seeing a timid woman getting up and being able to express herself is one of the nicest things I know of.

I’ve been retired since ’69, but a lot of people still call me with their personal problems. If you just listen, it’ll help them. Not longer than last week I started to leave a woman’s house and she said, “Sit down.” Said, “I’ve got to ask you something. My daughter-in-law wants to take me to live at her house and the other one wants me to stay here.” Said, “What am I going to do?” Said, “Please tell me what to do.” I said, “You’re old enough to do what you want to do. You and I have gotten to that age now when we can do whatever we want to do.”

People sometimes just want you to tell them what to do, but you don’t. Help them see the choices, but leave it up to them. Then they can’t come back and say, “See, you shouldn’t have told me....” It takes a long time to learn that, but you learn it after a while.

I had a state man come by and interview me, wanted to know what problems I had in the county and who had ever talked ugly to me. I said I didn’t have any problems and no one ever talked ugly to me.

Some of the other agents said, “You always laugh at everything. You never take anything personally.” I’ve just always been that way. Could understand why people did things and all. I went in a house one time, and this young boy said, “Mama, everything brightens up when Miz Elizabeth comes in.” And I thought, well now, I’ve never thought about that. But I thought it was real nice, him saying so.