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Memories of Golde Dicks Markham (1996) Golde Markham Dicks 63/125

lightweight, three lines if heavy. Men put the lines under the burial box and the stronger men

took each of the ends of the lines to lower the casket down into the hole to rest on the
bottom, then they pulled the lines out. Sometimes the lines didn’t pull out. If this happened, a
man jumped down into the hole to lift the box up high enough so the lines would pull loose.

In the early 1930s, I attended a funeral in a funeral home and then went to the grave
site. The funeral home hired local’ black men to dig their graves and fill them. These men
stood back where they couldn’t be seen while the commitment service was taking place.
After a few minutes the black men started filling in the grave, but then the deceased’s

son started screaming. The undertaker ran over to him.
The man shouted, “I don’t want any “N-----throwing dirt in my father’s face.”
His behavior to me sure seemed disorderly. The black men were embarrassed; the

undertaker was embarrassed. I think everyone present was ashamed of this man’s behavior.
The undertaker had to dismiss the gravediggers. Consequently, friends of the deceased had
to take off their best coats to shovel dirt to fill the grave.

As the years went by, Pa got more in demand for his preaching. He was invited to run
revivals in west Florida, south Florida, and Georgia most of the summer. The rest of the
family had to do the work at home. One summer while he was away, the hogs were stricken

with cholera and died in piles—our hogs weighed several hundred pounds. Tribble and I dug
holes in the ground right beside the dead hogs so that both of us could take hoes and roll
them into the hole. The odor was so bad we had to tie rags over our nose and mouth. A
bunch of these hogs went to die in the shade under the grapevine. The grapes were just

getting ripe, but nobody would dare eat a grape that summer!

Ma and Pa planted several acres for a peach orchard1 located between the crib, the lot,

and the prairie. Neighbors took tubs home with them of every imaginable kind of peach.
We also had plum and pear orchards south of the house and canned those Bruits which
we divided with the neighbors. We worked hard in the orchards, and those trees bore much

Bruit for our table and our neighbors.

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