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Memories of Golde Dicks Markham (1996) Golde Markham Dicks 64/125
Many black and white families lived on our farm in our half-cropper house and did
what everyone called “half-cropping.” I remember Sid Williams and his family, then the
Melton, Tomlinson, Morris, Beasley, Jenkins, and J.B. Smith families.
The Joe Jenkins family was black. We called the father “Junks.” His wife Frances
cooked all sorts of goodies—chocolate cake, cookies, potato pies, and egg custard pies.
Pa plowed up ground snakes a lot. We would put one under a pile of potatoes for
Frances to find. She danced around and. spoke in unknown tongues all over the potato field.
That was so funny to us.
The Meltons had a grown daughter, Ollie. Every Easter weekend, on Saturday after
noon, Ollie organized an egg rolling contest or an egg hunt and about fifty neighbors showed
up. My mother always made me a new dress for Easter and let me get all dressed up for the
games. Ollie hid the eggs in the field between Dewy’s house and the springhead.
The Tomlinson family had several children. Curly was the oldest son and one of the
Tomlinson daughters was my age. Curly had a brass head Ford and drove his sister down to
our house so we could go for a ride. After he had gone some distance from our house, he’d
let me take over. In fact, Curly taught me how to drive. I could drive a car before my parents
realized I already knew how.
One memory from my childhood still sends cold shivers up and down my spine. If a
black man was accused of raping a white woman, white men took him to a certain huge
persimmon tree just north of Watermelon Park and hanged him. I knew one woman who was
raped by a black man, and I believe this was the last black man hanged from that tree.
We had what we called the “wash hole” down in the branch and went bathing right in
the road. The road wasn’t paved yet so when it rained allot, the water would be about 500
feet from one side to the other. At that time, Aunt Clara and Uncle Walter lived in Grandpa
Dicks’s little cropper house just north of the branch. None of us owned bathing suits. If we
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