Alabama 4

Listen to Alabama 4, a woman in her 70s from Chambers County, Alabama, United States. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 70s

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1928

PLACE OF BIRTH: Chambers County, Alabama

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: African-American

OCCUPATION: retired office administrator

EDUCATION: N/A

AREA(S) OF RESIDENCE OUTSIDE REPRESENTATIVE REGION FOR LONGER THAN SIX MONTHS: N/A

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH: N/A

The text used in our recordings of scripted speech can be found by clicking here.

RECORDED BY: Daydrie Hague

DATE OF RECORDING: 2000

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

My dad preached to us about the importance of school, and plenty days I didn’t want to go, because I didn’t have things like the other kids had. Everything was homemade, which … my mother was a seamstress. She made everything we wore, with the exception of shoes. You had two pairs of shoes, one for church, one for school. Then the minute you got home, you changed that set of clothin’ and those shoes, and you went to work. After all that workin’, and gettin’ the kids fed, you’d do your dishes, and you had two lamps, kerosene lamps. We would clear the big table in the kitchen, and everybody sat around and got their homework there. And this was an everyday thing. And, I was kind of slow when it came to math, but I had a brother that was a whiz. We would do all of his English and help him, and he would help us with the math. He wanted to fix the math, just on paper, and you’d take it to school and turn it in, but when you’d ask questions: Why this was here to that power, especially in algebra, he’d call you dumb. And then that would start a big fight. And then the mother would break up the game of marbles from outside, which you were eager to go and play. So this went on. Finally, when it got to high school, that was really hard because you had to have money for this, and money for that. And we did not. It took you for months to save up for a class ring. B- bu- but we did it. So everybody got eager to leave, because this was before integration, and the older you got, the more you were picked on, goin’ through town and passin’ through the white neighborhood. So we had to change our route goin’ back and forth to school.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Jacqueline Baker

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 20/01/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY: N/A

COMMENTARY BY: N/A

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

The archive provides:

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• Text of the speakers’ biographical details.
• Scholarly commentary and analysis in some cases.
• In most cases, an orthographic transcription of the speakers’ unscripted speech.  In a small number of cases, you will also find a narrow phonetic transcription of the sample (see Phonetic Transcriptions for a complete list).  The recordings average four minutes in length and feature both the reading of one of two standard passages, and some unscripted speech. The two passages are Comma Gets a Cure (currently our standard passage) and The Rainbow Passage (used in our earliest recordings).

 

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