Densho Digital Archive - Ben Tamashiro Interview (denshovh-tben

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BT: Well, we used to have a group of supervisors, they were called lunas. Luna meaning "high," and this is precisely where they were, physically, too. They used to come around on horses, leather riding boots, and leather whips in their hands. And these are all actual symbolisms of power, luna, what it implies. In the old days, according to our folks, it used to be real bad. Lunas used to come around and really whip the workers to get them to do more work out in the hot sun. And when they get into confrontations with the men themselves, they used to run them down with the horses. This is how bad it was. Whip 'em, and, of course, many of them would land in the hospital. But in our time, 1930s, things had improved, of course, and we weren't subjected to this kind of thing, although they were always there. There was no doubt about it; we knew who they were. And to give you an idea of how these things work, for instance, my father was a tailor, and although he wasn't an actual employee of the McBryde Plantation, he still was having his tailor shop on plantation land. So every year he had to make a tribute to the luna. So come New Year's time, he'd tell me to take three of my best chickens, "Let's bring it up to the luna's home." I said, "What for?" Well, said, "Because we've got to do it," and I used to object to those things.

[Interruption]

KL: What do you mean by your best chickens?

BT: Well, you know, I raised them myself. And I really didn't know how to raise chickens, but like any country boy, you go at it, and pretty soon you have a whole flock of chickens, maybe two dozen of them. But they were my chickens, I raised them myself. So when my father tells me to --

LD: Okay, you hit your mike. You say, "They were my chickens," you hit the mike. Start over again. "I raised these chickens, they were my chickens." Start over. "I raised these chickens."

BT: I raised these chickens myself, they were my chickens.

LD: Start off by saying, you're telling a story from that part. "I raised chickens, they were my chickens." Explain.

BT: I raised these chickens. They were my chickens. And when my father tells me to take the best one, I objected to this. Why should my best ones be given away? But he insisted on that. So I dutifully catch the three best chickens, get a gunnysack, cut three holes at the bottom, take one of the chickens, shove it down, stick its next out the whole, take the next one and do the same thing until I got three chickens. Then would tie up the bag, then we'd get into my old man's Model T, he used to have an old Model T touring car, and we'd drive up to Mr. English's home, the luna's home, which was just about a mile away. He'd knock on the door, Mr. English would come out, and my dad would make the tribute of the three chickens. And, of course, he'd say thank you and everything, but he wouldn't take it. He'd tell me, "Oh, take it out to the back, put it in the coop." So I'd go back there and I'd see there were these chicken coops, a whole row of them, and they're all stuffed with chickens because the others had already made the same tribute to him. And I'm looking at that thing and I'm saying to myself, "Now why does he need more chickens when he gets more than he can ever eat?" And I used to object to this thing. Here's a guy that had all he wanted, now I had to give him three more of my best chickens. That used to make me mad. And, of course, I think one of the other things that used to make me mad was the fact that when we knocked on the door, he would not personally take the chickens himself like you would expect the guy to take a gift, be thankful and everything else. No, he just said, "Take it to the back." And that used to rankle me. But that's how these things worked.