Hearth & home
Family who grew up picking cotton buys ‘mansion’ across the street
JONESVILLE, S.C. — Dorothy Ngongang grew up as a sharecropper, picking cotton in South Carolina in the 1950s and ‘60s.
Her family of 12 lived in a twobedroom hut where they slept on flour sacks stuffed with grass. Each child owned one pair of clothes at a time.
“We had a typical-looking sharecropping hut with brown wood and broken windows,” said Ngongang, who is now 72 and lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. “You had to make sure you had cats to be sure you kept the snakes down.”
Across the street stood a large white house with a wraparound porch that Ngongang and her siblings, then known as the Giles family, often admired as they worked in the fields.
“It was a mansion to us,” Ngongang said of the house. “We thought it was beautiful.”
The Gileses, who are AfricanAmerican, would peer over at the house from their modest home in Jonesville, a town with an area of 1 square mile in Union County, South Carolina.
The house didn’t belong to the landowners the Giles family worked for. A well-off white family, the Wheelers, lived in the home and their daughters were playmates of the Giles kids. They’d all play out in the fields together, or sometimes under the porch. The home the Wheelers lived in not only represented the financial stability that the Gileses’ This house in Jonesville, S.C., sat vacant for 10 years and needed a lot of work for the Giles family to get it back in shape. “It was a mansion to us,” Dorothy Giles Ngongang said of the home when she was little.
Printing the bad word
Some of you wrote or called to say that you were shocked to see that we printed the vulgar word President Donald Trump used to describe Haiti and some African nations.
The decision to print it was mine, and it was not difficult.
The short explanation is that the president said it.
Yes, it is shocking. It is shocking that the president would say such a thing about other countries in the world. And I believe that when the president uses that kind of