507 6/30/1943 Helen Carlson to Sadie Erwin

Helen Carlson 401 Alexander, Monroe, Louisiana Wednesday, June 30, 1943

Sadie Erwin Nortonia Hotel, Portland, Oregon

Dear Mom, I just finished a letter to Pop so will write to you now. Gosh there are so many in our family to write to I never get letters written to anyone else. Elmer gets out at four o’clock now and is home by four thirty so we went out and ate and took Jimmie with us and then we went for a ride. When we got home the colored woman called and said my laundry was ready so we went over after it. I brought it to her Tuesday and have it back already so that certainly beats the laundry. The day I took it I was especially lazy and didn’t feel like doing anything so I took absolutely everything to her. My pants and just everything of Jim’s and didn’t leave a thing to rinse out myself. It would have cost five dollars at least at the laundry and this woman whose name is Winnie did just lovely work and only charged two dollars and I thought that was plenty reasonable because she furnished the starch and soap and did such nice work and really had a stack of it. It won’t be so much each time though because I usually wash out the towels and Jim’s clothes and our underwear myself and that cuts it down a lot. This Winnie has three little children and they were all out on the porch so I brought Jimmie over to them but he hung onto me like everything. He must have noticed the difference in color because he is always anxious to play with white children. Annie lives right next door to Winnie and she came out on her porch and I talked to her for a while. All the Negroes around there looked so clean and so do their houses. There is one part of nigger town where the people look awfully dirty but it is nice around Annie’s house so I suppose they are a lot like white people, some clean ones and some dirty ones. It turned nice and cool last night. We even had to have something over us and it stayed cool all day today and it really felt wonderful. It made me feel like working so I washed the front and back porches and the kitchen floor and did quite a washing and cleaned the house up real good. I went over to Jane Collora’s again for lunch. She had another girl over too who had a new baby and Jimmie was so crazy about that baby we couldn’t keep him away from the buggy. He would just stand there and watch the baby. That would have been alright but he wanted to pat its cheeks and hold its hands all the time and the baby was trying to sleep. Colloras are leaving for New York Friday and then he intends to get a release from this company and go to work for some company in Tulsa, Oklahoma. So many of the men are quitting here to take some other job. I hope Elmer does, for a job out there. I’m pretty sure we won’t go to Lake Charles because everyone says it is so terrible there. One man just came back from there and said you can’t get groceries or even bread unless you get to the store the first thing in the morning and the houses they are finding for the employees are just terrible because there just isn’t anything else. One man did get a nice house but he said the rent they had to pay for it was simply terrible. Elmer says of course if they make it worth his while to go there he will but otherwise not. We don’t even know where they will want him to go but they are keeping him here to the last to do any last minute work that comes up. He says there is hardly anything to do and he doesn’t see how they can possibly need him for two months longer. Rather than move on to some other southern town I would just soon stay here all summer long because it is so nice here and we like our apartment so well. I hope you are still getting along fine, Mom, and learning a lot. I’m going to make some lemonade now and then look at my new magazines that came today. I had a letter from Mrs. Ellsworth yesterday and she said she had heard from you recently. Good night for this time and I’ll write more later. With Love, Helen