MILT HINTON NEA Jazz Master (1993)
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Funding for the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program NEA Jazz Master interview was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts. MILT HINTON NEA Jazz Master (1993) INTERVIEWEE: Milt Hinton (June 23, 1910 – December 19, 2000) INTERVIEWER: William Taylor DATE: August 12-13, 1992 DESCRIPTION Transcript, 159 pages (START OF AUDIO FILE) TAYLOR: Milt, really this is going to be really a This Is Your Life kind of interview. I‟ve talked to you on many occasions and you‟ve shared a lot of your memories with me but I‟d really like to go back and do something we haven‟t done. First of all let‟s talk about your childhood. We‟ll start with your childhood. Do you remember your grandparents? HINTON: Yeah, both my grandmothers. I remember both of my grandmothers. In fact my mother‟s mother was born a slave. She was born a slave of Joe Davis, Jefferson Davis‟ father. He was president of the South. After the Emancipation Proclamation she took the name of the overseer, which was Carter. So her name was Henry Lettie Carter. After the Emancipation she married a man named Matt Robinson so her last name was Henry Lettie Carter Robinson. This man had a horse and a buggy. He was a hack man. He had what you call a carriage so he did very well. They had 13 children, most of them didn‟t really live. Only five of them really lived to be to their adulthood, which one was my mother. TAYLOR: Why did they lose so many? HINTON: Well smallpox, she spoke… told us so much, such terrible things about what happened with smallpox. She went… her husband died five months before the last child was born so she had… this woman 12 or 13 children. For additional information contact the Archives Center at 202.633.3270 or [email protected] 1 TAYLOR: Excuse me, what are we getting? I‟m sorry. So you were saying that smallpox… HINTON: My grandfather… I never saw either one of my grandfathers but my grandmother on my mother‟s side, her husband died five months before his last child was born. You can imagine an old lady with 10 or 12 children, a black woman in Vicksburg, Mississippi in those days. She had a tough time but she worked for a family as maid that owned the department store, Bear Brothers. Bear was their name and they paid her $3.50 a week for washing, ironing, cooking, and everything. But she cooked enough… she [unintelligible] to buy as much food as she wanted for them so she fixed for them and had enough left over for her children. They‟d come in the back door after she fed the family and give the children to take home… the older ones to take home to the younger ones. She evidentially was a [unintelligible] old lady. Well I know she was because she lived quite some time. She asked this man if she could put a little stand up outside of his store because in the morning people would be coming to work and she‟d sell them a cup of coffer and two biscuits for five cents in those days. She had made the jelly. She augmented her $3.50 salary doing this. She talked about the really sad thing of how she lost so many children during the… they had an epidemic of smallpox and there was no place for black people… TAYLOR: No hospital. HINTON: No hospital. They had what they called a Piss House where they put them and they quarantined our house so she couldn‟t even get to her children. She had to put food under the gate to them. She was quarantined then and the ones that were babies, really to small to get around, they‟d let her take them to the Piss House. So she wound up in this Piss House with them and she told me what a terrible place it was. They didn‟t give them water. People would drink out the urinal. She said she could see… in the morning she could see… they had what you call a dray, that‟s a two-wheeled wagon. They had carted up black people on this thing. They would be groaning and they would still take them to the graveyard. They were still… so it was kind of a tough scene for her. But she was a Christian lady and she lived until I was in Cab Calloway‟s band, 1939. TAYLOR: Really, my goodness. HINTON: 103 years old she made. She was the one that really kept our family together. TAYLOR: What about your other grandmother? HINTON: My other grandmother was from Africa. For additional information contact the Archives Center at 202.633.3270 or [email protected] 2 TAYLOR: Really? HINTON: Yes, she was brought here by missionaries. My father was brought here by missionaries. That‟s where we had the conflict in our family. They brought the African people to Mississippi and they couldn‟t conform to the society. My father married my mother and naturally he was a young man and they sent him to school for agriculture but he couldn‟t conform with those conditions so he left. My mother and him separated when I was three months old and she never saw my father again. I saw him when… the first time I saw my father, I was 30 years old in Cab‟s band. TAYLOR: Really? He was still here in the United States? HINTON: He went to Africa. Firestone had built a rubber plantation, [unintelligible] in Africa to stay away from [unintelligible] in South America so [unintelligible] he did plant this rubber plantation and he used these blacks that had some advancement about agriculture. So my dad went back there but what I can hear about him, he evidentially… he wasn‟t too successful there even though he managed this plantation. He came back to the United States but he didn‟t come back to my mother. He came back to Memphis, Tennessee and he was very well educated in agriculture. A cotton sampler was the best job a black man could have down in the South because he had that big machete and when the cotton buyers had to go and buy cotton, he had to rely on the cotton sampler, this black guy, to set his machete and feel that cotton and tell him whether it was grade A or grade B cotton and they would bid according to that. So that was a pretty important job and a good job. So he was doing that. That‟s when I saw him. I was playing with Cab Calloway. TAYLOR: You were traveling in the South then? HINTON: I was traveling in the South with Cab Calloway‟s band, Cozy Cole, and she was there with me around about that time. I was playing a solo and Benny [Unintelligible} the piano player said to me, he said, “I heard your father‟s in town, did you see him”? I said, “No”. He said, “Well there he is standing over there in the wings”. I saw this guy standing over there looking exactly like me [laugh]. I didn‟t know what to say to him. He had contributed nothing towards my education and my well-being, and my mother had to [unintelligible] I was feeling so… and I didn‟t know what to say but he said the right words. He said, “Your mother‟s done a wonderful job”. When he give my mother credit… because I hugged him and kissed him, and Cozy Cole, and Shavern, and all of us went to the bard and had a drink together. So he stayed there in Memphis and then when they built the atomic bomb in Oakridge, everybody was concerned with the cotton that were used down there. Cotton is the basis… cotton acetate is the basis for explosives. For additional information contact the Archives Center at 202.633.3270 or [email protected] 3 TAYLOR: Oh, I didn‟t know that. HINTON: Yes, it‟s a very, very important basis so they took all of the people, whether they swept the floor or not, that knew about cotton, and that‟s where… my father died there after they had made the atomic bomb down there in Oakridge, Tennessee. That‟s the only thing I have of my father is his citation. They gave everyone that worked a citation because the place had gone up. Everybody was gone up. So the only thing I have of his is his citation from Oakridge saying this is… and his razor. So my early childhood in Mississippi was kind of sparse. My grandmother was the there and she took care of me. My mother was trying… my mother was the only of the children that had a chance of an education, that grew into adulthood. She had four sisters and brothers. Two sisters and two brothers and my mother. They‟re the five that lived through my lifetime. My mother was the only one that was… for some reason they kept her in school. My uncles, my mother‟s brothers would go down to the railroad shack in Vicksburg, Mississippi and thumb their fingers in their nose at the railroad engineers and they would call them all kinds of little black names and throw coal at them. TAYLOR: [Laugh]. HINTON: And they‟d pick this coal up and take it downtown and sell it. We have those bayous in Mississippi down there.