Tennessee Seven - Text
Caucasian female, born 1944 from Nashville, TN. Has always lived in the same region.
Reads Comma Gets A Cure and then talks about her three children.
Recorded 6-8-01 by Patricia Childs; edited by Shawn M. Muller. Running time 00:04:32.
TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH
Yes, I would like to tell you about my three children: Melissa, Karen and Richard, junior. An’ as school would end, in the summer, they had to be here with me. An’ I was here as a housewife. Well, we’d start off the morning with cereal, and then, their adventure of cleaning up their rooms, and then they were bored. Well, that was all of about an hour. An’ I said, “Well, you must go outside in the yard an’ play.” No, they wanted to watch television, and then they would fight over who was gonna watch what program. Well, nevertheless, I would make ’em go in the backyard, and they had to learn to pretend. They had to use nature, or they could go an’ use cars, or they could play dolls, or they could color, or they could do anything, but, they always would come around to the wrong door, on the very front of the house, and they would find it locked. They would say, “Mother has locked us out of the house.” So they would go outside an’ they would sit under the tree. And they would talk about me, an’ they would cry. And then, soon as their dad would get home, they’d say they’ve been locked out, all day long. An’ it got so bad that Richard, junior went next door to visit. He knocked on the front door, ’n’ he said, “Mother has locked me out. Can I please have a peanut butter ’n’ jelly san’wich? I’m so hungry.” An’, then he would come back, after hitting the neighbors up for food-- Him an’ his sister Karen got the bright idea that they were gonna fix the driveway, of the lady’s next door. Because she had holes in her paved driveway. So they got their daddy’s concrete out, an’ they mixed it up in a bucket, an’ they had brushes, an’ they had trowels, an’ they would fill in all the holes in Nell’s driveway. Needless to say, that Dick had to go to the hardware store an’ buy brushes an’ take them back over there, an’ both of them spent the afternoon cleaning the concrete out of Nell’s driveway.