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Title |
Excerpt from Ruby Jamison Oral History Interview, 2011 October 14 |
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Personal name |
Jamison, Ruby--Interviews |
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Topical entry |
Rescue
Natural disasters--Nashville (Tenn.)
Storytelling--Nashville (Tenn.)
Oral history--Sources
Oral history--Library resources
Rescue work
Flood damage
Emergency vehicles
Fire departments--Nashville (Tenn.)--History
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Geographic entry |
Nashville (Tenn.)--Floods
Nashville (Tenn.)--History--21st century
Nashville (Tenn.)--History--Sources |
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Description |
Excerpt from an oral history interview with Ruby Jamison, conducted on October 14 2011 by Andrea Blackman as part of the Flood 2010 Digital History Project. Jamison describes the flooding of her home, her friend Joan’s home, their escape, and the aftermath of the flood. The complete interview and transcript are available in the Special Collections Division. |
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Transcript |
JAMISON: I guess I was at home when I first knew it was getting ready to flood because my church member came by and told me it’s really bad and said, “You need to probably come up to our house.” And I said, “Well, it’s never gotten up in the house before.” I’ve been out there forty years and we never had the flood come up higher than the carport in the back. So I said, “I’ll just sit it out down here.”
And I ended up getting in my car and going down to Joan’s house. I told her “I’m going to come there and sit the flood out with you.” So when I got—okay, when I first started to get into my car there was just a little water in the driveway, a little inch deep. And I backed out and went down to her house. And when I got to her house, which is half a block, I could still see her driveway, I could still see it real well and then the water continued. In the meantime, she hollered out the door, it was pouring down rain; she hollered out the door, “Don’t come in!” I guess she had heard somebody. I hadn’t, had not had the television on.
And we talked kind of back and forth, the window halfway down and what not, and at one time when the water got up a little bit, I tried to back out but I was afraid that I would get into the ditch so I just pulled back up into the driveway. Well, the driveway was level so I just pulled back in. And the water continued to rise, so it got a little higher and a little higher and a little higher. And in the meantime, ordinarily when it floods the water comes up from the creek but this water was coming from West Hamilton behind my car down to the creek, going down to the creek in torrents, which is really, really bad. So I don’t know for sure if I paid that much attention to it but I did know that’s where the water was going, or was coming from really.
And it finally got to where it was sloshing under my car, on the bottom of my car. So Mr. Johnson had told me he would come and get me in his truck so I called him and he tried to come down there but he said, called me and said he couldn’t get, it was just so far and that I “needed to call the fire department to get you.” And he called the fire department, in the mean time I called the fire department also and I told them I was making the same call. So one fire truck had passed a little before that time and I tried to kind of flag it down but it was raining so hard and I guess kinda dark and they didn’t see me. But they didn’t—I had not called by that time anyway. So shortly after that the fire truck came and they came down to my car and they asked me to come out the passenger side. So Joan was intending to stay in her house, she thought she could stay in there and I guess ride it out, sit it out, whatever. And they told her, “You have to come on too.” Because it was real bad. So they walked me back to the car, to the fire truck and I got up in the fire truck and then they went back and got her. And the fire truck backed up West Hamilton toward Clarksville Highway. And her son had come down to try and get us so he was up there near my house and we got out of the fire truck and got in his car, his van and they carried me to the Johnsons’ house, they told me to come there and she went on to her son’s house with him.
And my daughter lives in Murfreesboro; so the highway in Murfreesboro was kind of covered in water too so she couldn’t get up here, so I spent the night at the Johnsons. And then the next morning she came to Nashville and my sister from Antioch came in and Mr. Johnson called several church members and they went down and sort of cleaned the house out. So they didn’t want me to come down there early on, they said, I didn’t know what the story was, I thought somebody was going to come get me but they didn’t early on.
So finally Mrs. Johnson and I went down there about one o’clock. And the yard was full of things, as you can see in this picture where they’d drug things out in the yard. And that afternoon I went to my daughter’s house in Murfreesboro and stayed with her for a full year. |
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Creator |
Jamison, Ruby (Interviewee); Blackman, Andrea (Interviewer) |
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Publisher |
Special Collections Division of the Nashville Public Library, 615 Church Street, Nashville, Tennessee, 37219 |
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Contributors |
Gibbons, Susannah (Transcriber) |
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Date |
2011-10-14 |
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Type |
Sound; Oral histories |
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Format |
audio/mp3 (8.89MB; 04min., 51sec.) |
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Identifier |
FDHJamisonRClip001 |
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Source |
Excerpted from: Ruby Jamison Oral History Interview. Born-digital recording(s) converted to mp3 format for online access in 2012 from 16bit 44.1khz WAV file archival master recording. |
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Language |
English |
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Relation |
Flood 2010 Digital History Project |
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Coverage |
2010-2019 |
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Rights |
U.S. and international copyright laws protect this digital content, which is provided for educational purposes only and may not be downloaded, reproduced, or distributed for any other purpose without written permission. Please contact the Special Collections Division of the Nashville Public Library, 615 Church Street, Nashville, Tennessee, 37219. Telephone (615) 862-5782. |
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Location |
Closed Stacks-Special Collections Division |
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Geographic Data |
36.210814 -86.830553 |
Nashville Public Library Digital Collection
