User:Cjr100B/Aunt Hassie Fletcher

Aunt Hassie Fletcher was a housewife during the Great Depression, and was interviewed by a worker for the Federal Writers Project, a project aimed at employing everyday people to compose a history of America during the Great Depression. The documents are now housed in the Southern Historical Collection archives at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Early life
On December 4, 1870, a day her mom claims was the first snow of winter that year, Aunt Hassie Fletcher was born in Wake Forest, North Carolina. When she was still very young, her father had an accident while riding his mule, rendering him unable to farm. So she, along with older her siblings, became responsible for planting the crops that were vital to their family’s survival. Fletcher grew up poor, with only a cursory education provided by the subscription schools that dotted the rural South. She married her first husband, Arthur Burchum, rather young, after fatefully meeting him at the Easter picnic in 1888. He was an Englishman and worked in “landscape gardening”. Shortly after they met, Burchum got a steady job working for a wealthy client, and they were married in the fall of 1889.

Married Life
Mr. Burchum worked hard to provide for Aunt Hassie Fletcher, and the couple lived in a small cottage they rented. They had one child together, little Stanley. One day, after her husband had not returned from work, Aunt Hassie Fletcher received a message that he was badly hurt. Upon reaching him, she discovered that Arthur and another unnamed man had been murdered, the murderer never found.

Roughly three years after the tragic incident Aunt Hassie Fletcher married her second husband, Rob Fletcher. When the two began having children of their own, she was amazed by her husband’s kindness toward little Stanley.

Mr. Fletcher bought a farm for their family, and according to Mrs. Fletcher, “he was a hard worker but drank a lot” (p. 4513). Despite often drinking himself into “plain drunkenness”, the two worked hard to raise their children. Including little Stanley, Mrs. Fletcher had nine children with Mr. Fletcher, all of which worked on the family farm. The family was relatively happy, but, like much of the Southern farming class, they encountered hardships. Bad luck – the death of their prized mule and the death of their beloved cow—often met the little family, but Aunt Hassie Fletcher lived her life looking on the bright side, knowing that if they could just make it through the hardships they would be just fine.

Later Years
At the time of her interview, Mrs. Fletcher was still living in the same house. Most of her children, except for one of her sons, Johnny, who continued to work on the family farm, left her home and started lives of their own. Very content with life, Mrs. Fletcher continued to live a simple life, surrounded by her family and good food.

Poverty in the Post Civil War South
The generation Aunt Hassie Fletcher was born into lived in a time of great poverty and destruction. The Civil War had wrought terrible destruction in the South and Reconstruction, though formally ended in 1877, continued to rebuild the devastated South through 1900. As a result, public works, like education, suffered (p. 35).

Public Education in the Late 19th Century
Children in the South during the last quarter of the 19th century were subject to a mediocre public school system (p. 29). As Aunt Hassie Fletcher mentioned in her interview, children went to school for very short periods of time. Southern schools suffered especially, and, compared to those in the North, lacked resources, good teachers, a solid curriculum, and compulsory attendance laws (p. 420). The regional divide in education contributed much to the poverty of the already devastated South (p. 417). This poor education, according to Knight, a renowned scholar on education, worked to keep the poor of the South poor (p. 415). Since education is a means to a better life, children like Aunt Hassie Fletcher, who were subject to such a destitute education system, had no real hope of raising their socioeconomic status until strives were made to improve the Southern education system.

Family Life After the Civil War
The poverty following the Civil War and the break down of the plantation system led to the creation of many small family farms like Mrs. Fletcher’s parents and her own farm (p. 161). During the time, small farms struggled to make both food for the family to consume and food to sell at market p. 161. Women had a more important role in the house now, helping out with the planting and harvesting (p. 163). However, despite this new role, women in the South tended to follow the old school of thought on their role in the family, believing it was their job to keep a solid home for their children and husband (p. 164). They believed women were responsible for providing the moral cornerstone for her family (p. 165). In her interview, Aunt Hassie Fletcher is quoted as saying that “I think no man can have a home and stays there and makes it for him”, reflecting that very same school of thought that worked to keep women home and away from their independence (p. 4517).

Issues of Historical Production in the Federal Writers Project
Many of the writers in working for the W.P.A. at the time of the Federal Writers Project were themselves as depressed economically and emotionally as those they interviewed. Many of them, who later went on to become famous writers, were ashamed of their involvement in the project, clearly indicating they did not find their job a particularly important one. This fact raises questions about how much effort was put into the interviews taken, and subsequently how accurate they are, due to the general consensus that employment by the Federal Writers Project was something to be ashamed of and not celebrated.