Stetson Kennedy: I wrote a book called Palmetto Country in 1942, and Alan Lomax, the music historian, read it and liked it, so he passed it on to Woody. Woody sent me some fan mail. He wrote this one long letter on the back of the dust jacket of the book." [laughs] All written out on the back of the dust cover! The original letter has turned up in someone's possession in North Carolina.
BE: I thought the letter was here among your other archives.
SK: The [people who own the letter] were nice enough to send a full-sized color copy of it for display here, but we're still in negotiations for the original.
BE: How did it come about that Jean Paul Sartre published your book, The Jim Crow Guide?
SK: Well, I happened to be in Paris, and nobody in the United States wanted to publish it. You know, it was fifty years from the time I wrote it before it was published in the U.S. But while I was in France I met Sartre and he liked it.
BE: But what were you doing in France at that time?
SK: I had heard that there was a convention in Geneva, Switzerland in 1952 regarding forced labor. I contacted them because I knew that forced labor was happening right in this area. But when I called them, they said I was too late. The meeting was already adjourned.
But finally they said if I was willing to pay my own expenses and get there in ten days, they would hear what I have to say. I told them, "Great! I'll bring people who can testify" and they said, 'No, no, don't bring a bunch of people!' So I went around and recorded accounts of people around these parts and who worked in the turpentine factories. They were required to buy all their suppies from the company stores, which cost more than the wages they were paid, so they were dependent on the turpentine companies and could never leave. Or if they left, they were hunted down and arrested for the debts they owed to the company.
at Beluthahatchee
SK: You'll have to ask someone besides me for that answer. I don't know why our government does some of the things they do! What is your interest in all this?
BE: Well, I’m a writer, or at least I want to be one. I want to make my mark as a writer but I want to write about things that are important, like civil rights. So that way, I’m not selling out.”
SK: Well, I don’t recall so much wanting to be a writer. My goal was to lay stuff on people and make them think. Things needed to be told.”
BE: Were there times in the Klan that were really scary?
SK: Pretty much all the time! Whenever I thought I had been found out. Or when I had to sit in a room full of Klansmen at the courthouse, waiting to be called as a witness.
BE: Do you ever listen to bands like Rage Against the Machine?
SK: I've heard so many things, I can't remember them all. If they are politically active, the 'more the merrier' I say. We need all the help we can get.