Hettie Smith Carter

Hettie Smith Carter 1917-2010 was the wife of Dr. William Stanley Carter, Jr. from 1981.

Hettie Smith Carter gave an Oral History interview in 1999 with the Harvard-Radcliffe Program in Business Administration Oral History Project (see in SOURCES Tab).

HSC: I was brought up in the South in the most beautiful little typical southern village called Abbeville, South Carolina. I came from a family of bankers and farmers and cotton brokers. It was a most affluent, beautiful life where, for generations, my ancestors had loved the land and prospered immensely—great civic leaders, etc. I was the youngest of eight children. I was a twin and I have a brother and sister who are twins who were just 16 months older than I. There were, as a matter of fact, eight babies in eight years, because that was exactly what my mother and father loved. When we were young children, my mother, before we had any question at all about sex, beat us to the draw to tell us how wonderful sex was!

We were not pampered, but we were very aware of the position we held in society in this village and felt a great responsibility. Then along came 1925 when my grandfather, the president of the First National Bank of Abbeville, who evidently was a very strong-willed man, went against the advice of his board of directors who proceeded to close the bank. My father was a director of the bank and he felt a great responsibility to his father, so he turned over all of his large resources to his father to pay back the bank. That started our absolute financial demise from which we never recovered. I was eight at the time. It was a terrible thing. The little village was just split. When we would walk down the street, our cousins and closest friends wouldn’t speak to us because our grandfather supposedly had lost their money in the bank. But my mother took us aside and explained to us that it was not we and that people had every right to be worried about their money. She put the great, broad sweep as she did on everything. But it was a very memorable experience. There were supposed to be five of us in college at the same time because here we all were the same age. There literally was not one penny. My mother said we rode the registered Jerseys to college, and indeed we did. My father had been a gentleman farmer. He exported bulls from the Island of Jersey. Everything he did was just absolute perfection. So we did work our way through college. We all got scholarships. We went to the state teacher’s college because that was all we could afford. Our oldest sister had been in private schools in Virginia where we were all supposed to go, and that just changed, but we were young enough that it did not bother us at all. We were flexible. Everybody else was poor and so were we. So that was absolutely no problem.

I did very well in [school]. I was the valedictorian of the class. It had never occurred to me that I was bright. I don’t think I ever gave it any thought. It says here “What were some of the things you remember?” I loved my teachers, simply adored Latin, and as I said, it was quite a surprise to me when I was the valedictorian of the class. Looking back on it, the level of education was terribly low. We did not have money for me to go to even the state teacher’s college. The tuition I think was $250, and we did not have $250. We had a house loaded with fine antiques. There was a woman in the village who would come frequently to see if we didn’t want to sell some of them. My father hated her with a passion and he was such a gentleman, but he said, “Mother, don’t let her come again,” because she would dangle all of these things in front of us, and my mother kept saying to my father, “Darling, let’s sell this furniture. These are inanimate objects and our children must go to college.” Well, fortunately, he prevailed and said, “Well, let’s not do it quite yet. Maybe we can work out something else.” So we sold another registered Jersey, I guess. But mother wanted to sell her beautiful jewelry. One piece of furniture went, a four-poster bed that we all learned to climb up. All seven of us children met every Sunday morning in our parents’ huge double four-poster bed and learned to skin the cat on the teasters. That bed sold for what at that time must have been an astronomical figure: $450. So my twin and I had tuition to go to college one year each on that bed, but fortunately some of the other things did not get sold. Though they were tough times, it was a perfectly wonderful, free life. We had all of the accoutrements of the finer days—the linen, the silver, the china, the furniture, etc. And we grew everything: grew our own wheat, had our own flour ground, had our own smokehouse. My father had owned thousands of acres of land, and gradually each one of these farms went and finally we lost our own home. My father had an uncle who was a supreme court judge of the state and he said to my father, “I’m going to will the family place to you, so take it now.” So we lost our own home, moved into the old family home with all the gorgeous boxwood and everything else, lovely old place. We have a saying at home: “too proud to whitewash, too poor to paint.” So we moved into the unpainted house with all the nice stuff, and that was a beautiful detail. Several years later our uncle came to live the last years of his life with us in the home of his birth. . . .this was my great uncle who gave us the old family place when we had lost everything. And I can remember rushing home from high school, could hardly wait to get there. He had taken over the whole top floor with his orderly, nurse and chauffeur. And I would rush upstairs and he would quote Latin to me by the hour. So I just loved that aspect.

My father was so dignified and so conservative. And very proper. Had to know who your ancestors were. Mother couldn’t have cared less who your ancestors were. In fact, the worse they were and the better you were, the more credit she would give you. She also was way ahead of her time in race relations, had she not been married to a man like my father, she would have been a pioneer. But being his wife, she could not “burst over the traces.” But in her own quiet, wonderful way, even though we had not two pennies, she established, through friends and relatives, scholarships for young black women to go to nursing school and to business school.

I waited on tables in college. So we made our own way. But I did borrow money and I don’t know how much I owed when I got out of the four years of college. And here’s another wonderful story. The uncle who was a supreme court judge who had left us the old family place had a brother who was a very famous judge and he died the day the last one of us graduated from college, which was my twin. She graduated the year after I did. And the day she graduated, he died and left the bulk of his estate to us. Isn’t that something? So then we didn’t have to whitewash! It’s a fairy tale. It meant that my mother and father had complete financial security for the rest of their lives.

. . . [t]he War came along, so I went to work for the American Red Cross as a staff aide interviewing soldiers who were being discharged for psychoneurotic reasons. I’ve always had this leaning toward social work and people. I was not qualified as a social worker but I was an aide, and it was a wonderful job for me. I decided that I wanted to go overseas, so I was all set to do so when I began to think, “You know, this is not getting you anywhere professionally.” I had not the remotest idea what I wanted to do. By an absolute fluke, I heard of the Radcliffe program from my oldest sister (still alive at 90 but out of it for seven years now with dementia), a psychiatric social worker. I did not even know where Radcliffe was or that it was part of Harvard! I wrote directly, but I think beyond the time you were supposed to put in an application. I will never know why I was accepted because I had not distinguished myself in any way academically. Even though I had in high school, I fell into mediocrity in college. I think the only thing I had going for me was geographical distribution. They must have wanted somebody from the South. But anyhow, I got in. I’ve always said my life has been shot through with luck, and this is one of the luckiest things that ever happened to me. I knew I needed to get out of the South. I did not know what I wanted to do, and this absolutely opened up a whole new world. I inherited enough of my mother’s sensitivity to know that the South was so restricted in its outlook, and I just did not want that. So off I went. And a dear, dear friend of mine whose husband was being sent overseas, wrote me a letter, and my letter to her crossed saying that I was going to Radcliffe. She had said, “I’m going to Boston.” So our letters crossed. She and I landed in Cambridge. We stayed at the Continental Hotel on Chauncey Street until we could find some living quarters. This was during the War when they had one class after another in the Navy coming back and forth through Harvard.