BIOGRAPHY OF EX-SLAVE CATHERINE SCALES
About ten years old at the "Srenduh", now quite feeble, but aristocratic in her black dress, white apron and small sailor hat made of black taffeta silk with a milliner's fold around the edge, Aunt Catherine is small, intensely black with finely cut features and thin lip. Her hand is finely molded, fingers long and slender. Her voice is soft and poise marks her personality. Sallie Martin, a ginger cake colored woman, sixty-five, has lived as a kind of caretaker with Aunt Catherine since 1934 and thereby gets her own roof and refreshment. For Aunt Catherine has gotten "relief" from the county welfare chief, Mrs. John Lee Wilson, and Jeff Scales, seventy, brings Sallie to the "relief" dispensary in his two horse wagon for the apples or onions or grape fruits or prunes with dried bena, milk, canned beef or potatoes as the stores yield. A white horse and a brown mule comprise the team, and several dogs trot along side. Sally also small and frail looking sits in a chair planted in the flat wagon bed behind the drivers' seat, a plank resting on the sides. Jeff drives close to the door, alights and helps Sallie step on to the back of the bed, thence to a chair he has placed, then to the ground, just as polite whites did to their women folks after the war when they would ride to town or to church or to picnics in wagons in order to carry the family, the servants, the dinner, horse feed, water bucket, chairs, cushions. Sallie gets in line, presents Aunt Katherine's card which she has gotten by mail, hears the dispensing lady call to the helping men what Aunt Catherine is to have, and struggles to the door with it where Jeff meets her, transfers the load to his wagon bed. Then with his hands he steadies Sallie as she mounts the chair, then the back of the wagon bed, over the side with voluminous long skirts, and old fashioned ruffled sun bonnet. Off to the hilly north part of Madison called Freetown, Jeff's [TR: Jeff] expertly guides his team through automobile traffi. [TR: traffic] During the worst of the depression Aunt Sallie said she kept her coal reserve in a tub upstairs so nobody could steal it.
Aunt Katherine strengthened by her relief food can talk comfortably.
"I shure did love my white fokes—Ole Marse, Timberlikk (Timberlake) an' Ole Miss Mary Timberlikk. My mother, Lucy Ann Timberlikk bough their portraits at the sale of the old Timberlake things, and kepp them an' brought them with her to Madison, when we moved up here, an kepp them until mummy was in her last sickness, an' two of Ole Misses daughters came over from Greensboro, an' begged,—an mammy sold the pictures to them for a quarter a piece. I still have Ole Misses mother's dish, though. I've got in [TR: it] packed away in a safe place. I'll get it and show it to you." It is a large flat platter of the ware called iron ware and was generally used to serve fried ham and eggs while the gravy came in a small deep dish. In summer, a heap of snaps greasy with middling meat slashed and boiled down dry with Irish potatoes around the edge came to table in the platter.
The keeper of the Timberlake oil portraits was Lucy, slave of Nat Scales, and Lucy's husband was Nathan Scales. Slave Nat Scales (named for Marse Nat) had married a black woman who came "across the water", Sallis [TR: Sallie?] Green who become by purchase Sallie Scales. Thus Aunt Katherine recalls her grandmother as one who "cum over the water with a white lady". The purchaser Mrs. Scales was from the LeSeur family. Her father was clerk of the Rockingham county court as early as [TR: missing date?] and kept the session records of his Presbyterian church in a fine neat script.
"The LeSeurs had as big a house as the Scales house at Deep Springs. I've stayed many a nite in it. It was next to Ole Marse Jimmie Scaleses. John Durham Scales, Marse Jimmy's grandson lived and died in it—his grandmother's house, the old Le Seur place, ten miles down the Dan river towards Leaksville. Miss Mary Le Seur married Marse Gus Timberlikk, an was the grandmother of William Timberlake Lipscomb who used to come up to Madison and go to Dr. Schuck's Beulah Academy just after the Srenduh. When Marse Billy'd get lonesome, he'd go down to Spring Garden and dance with the Scales girls. Ole Marse Le Seur's wife was Miss Lizzie Scales Marse Jimmie's.
"Nome, us slaves didn't have no chuch. Marse Nat Scales ud let his slaves go to the babtizings.
"I could hoe but I didn't do much clean up work. I spun on a great big wheel that went m-m-m-m-m. I wish I had a big wheel to spin on right now. My mammy, Lucy Ann, could weave. She sho loved her white fokes. Cullud fokes didn't have much sence den. She would take cow hair and kyard and spin it with a little cottin in to rolls, and then she'd weave cloth out of it.
"An how they made their shoes den: My father would cut shoes out of the raw cowhide and put them on bottoms (soles) he cut out uv wood. An he couldn't run in them a-tall, just had to stomp along! An day didn't put on shoe till nearly Christmas."