“What do you have to pay?”
“Ten or twelve dollars a month.”
“There was a heap of Irishmen to work on the railroad; they was paid a dollar a day; there was a good many Americans, too, but mostly they had little carts and mules, and hauled dirt and sich like. They was paid twenty-five or thirty dollars a month and found.”
“What did they find them?”
“Oh, blanket and shoes, I expect; they put up kind o’ tents like for ’em to sleep in altogether.”
“What food did they find them?”
“Oh, common food; bacon and meal.”
“What do they generally give the niggers on the plantations here?”
“A peck of meal and three pound of bacon is what they call ’lowance, in general, I believe. It takes a heap o’ meat on a big plantation. I was on one of William R. King’s plantations over in Alabamy, where there was about fifty niggers, one Sunday last summer, and I see ’em weighin’ outen the meat. Tell you, it took a powerful heap on it. They had an old nigger to weigh it out, and he warn’t no ways partickler about the weight. He just took and chopped it off, middlins, in chunks, and he’d throw them into the scales, and if a piece weighed a pound or two over he wouldn’t mind it; he never took none back. Ain’t niggers all-fired sassy at the North?”
“No, not particularly.”