4/30/2023 0 Comments Rhythm doctor sleeve paint![]() To support this family, Tolliver did mostly unskilled maintenance work he admits that taking care of his progeny has always been difficult. He fathered thirteen children, eleven of whom survive. Soon after his wedding he entered the army, and prompted his own discharge, he says, to return home to Montgomery. In the early 1940s, he married a longtime friend, Willie Mae Thomas of Ramer, Alabama. ![]() Tolliver supported himself and his mother by tending other people’s gardens he did general maintenance, house painting, light carpentry, and plumbing as well. Too financially strapped to continue farming, the Tollivers, like so many others, left the farm for the city and moved in the 1930s to Montgomery, to a house on Sternfield Alley (later obliterated by the construction of Interstate 85). He remembers that his parents’ house was “just a shack, but my mama had pictures all over the walls.” He attended school until he was eight or nine, then moved to nearby Macedonia, where he worked for the owner of a dry-cleaning business in Montgomery who also operated a small truck farm in Macedonia. Publicationsīorn Mose or Moses Ernest Tolliver on July 4, 1921, or '22, to tenant farmers Ike and Laney Tolliver in the Pike Road community southeast of Montgomery, Tolliver was one of twelve children. This material is derived from conversations with William Arnett in 19. Said "I'll buy it but you gotta give it a name." I said, "I don't know no name." He say, "You got to think of one." I said, "All right, call it Mose T" He bought every picture I had. I painted pictures from that plate, and this man Robert Bishop bought the first one. Man from the state told me not to paint from the books, said it was wrong. People brought me books to copy out of so I started doing that. The first picture I did on wood was a red bird. When I got hurt, I had more time to paint, and wood was a whole lot easier to get hold of. I painted over pictures that I found too. Painted on the back part of the glass of the television set you look at. I used to paint on glass before I did wood. They didn't want me to go nowhere else to work. If the weather was real bad, the contract I had then let me come in the house, clean up, paint the inside of the house. Rain or shine or whatever else the weather was, I did the work. When the strike went on, they laid everybody off, but I had a contract on about seventy-five yards, and they let me do the work. Peoples say I first painted when I hurt my feet, but I painted way before that. I nailed them outside on the wall but they took them down when they put Christmas lights up. I painted pictures on the part where the meat come from. I got some deer hides once and painted them too. I stuff them and paint them and put varnish on them. If I could find some of them things now it would sell better than anything in this house. And I made eyes out of pins or marbles or pieces of broke glass. Sometimes I put clear varnish on it to make it bright. I would dot them up with all kinds of different stuff, paint and dirt and mud and stuff like that. So I would hang them roots and things from a line and the sun dried them off. ![]() They use them just like y'all use art, put them in their houses for decorating, yeah, colored folks got to decorate too. They would wash them off and paint them and put something like snakes on them, or birds. I learned about that from them men that was doing it. So I would get me some old tree stumps and tree roots and I would wash them all I could. I seen somebody with some when I was 'round about maybe eighteen or nineteen, down by Pike Road, and I wondered how he done it. I found them things out in old vacant lots. ![]()
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