Mr. James Evans

Yes ma’am, I’m a native of Isle of Wight County.  I was born in Isle of Wight County.  I’m 85; I was born in 1900, the 18th of January.  I have spent most of my life right here in Walters, in other words, around Windsor.  I was working in Windsor; I was born in Windsor.  I can’t tell you much about school days.  I know that’s something you hate to hear, but you don’t have a time reading, but I do.  The school I went to mostly was the school they had in a hall at Windsor.  Windsor Hall?  The St. Luke Hall?  No, I got it wrong, the Good Samaritan Hall.  It’s right there in the cross of the road where the road divides off 258 and Backwater Rd.—right here in Windsor. 

Most of my childhood days, my father was the man. When I was real young, when we started out, he was a colored worker and wasn’t at home and I was the oldest child. I always had all the work to do, and there wasn’t much play for me,’cept now and then. From the time I was old enough to hold my hands to a plow, I was messing around trying to plow. All my life…  And you take my boyhood, the biggest game I had was shooting marbles, playing marbles.  Well you take all my playmates now, I was telling somebody the other day, that all my playmates that I come home with, knowing my age, there’s only three of them besides me living.   One of them is Tommy Jones in Windsor, and Buck Rawls in Windsor, and Willie Roberts in Windsor.  They were boys with me.  Course, I’m a little bit older than either one of them, but yet it’s a difference of growing up together.  I’d never gone to school much.  I had to work, course, but school wasn’t running long, but sometime I’d go to school as much as a week, sometimes two weeks took a turn.  Never had a chance to go to school much.  The highest grade you could go to in that particular school, I think it was seven.  I may be wrong.  If the parents wanted the children to go past the 7th grade, they sent them to college.  I reckon it was Virginia State Normal School, I can’t tell you too much about that.

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Yeah, used to be fairs.  I don’t know why but I can’t tell you much about them.  Used to have sugar pulls a lot.  Now you take in Isle of Wight County, I call it “Exhibit Day.”  They’d have it at the courthouse every Easter Monday.  The school did it, just the colored school ‘cause the schools were segregated then, and only the colored school could have that day. 

The book Many Voices was published in 1986 as part of a project of the Interview Committee appointed in 1984 for the Isle of Wight County 350th Sesquitricentennial Celebration. The Oral History project taped the recollections of our older citizens and developed their stories from the transcriptions. Many Voices gave a permanent record of the previously unrecorded family life and history in Isle of Wight County. These excerpts take only the discussions dealing with the education memories of some of those citizens.