“I haven’t asked for the old folks pension—can’t get no one to believe that I am old enough for one thing. Can’t get it nohow. It is for destitute people. I can’t get under the security because they say I am too old for that. I’m too much of a worker to get old age assistance and too old to be allowed to put up tax to become eligible for old age pension.
“I never went to school. I just got an old blue back speller and taught myself how to read and write with what I picked up here and there from people I watched. That’s one way a man never fails to learn—watching people. That’s the only way our forefathers had to learn. I learned arithmetic the same way. I never considered I was much at figuring but I took a contract from a man who had all kinds of education and that man said I could do arithmetic better than he could.
“I belong to the A. M. E. Church. I have been a member of it for forty-one years.
“I have three boys living and one stepdaughter. But she feels like she is my own. I don’t make any difference. I never have whipped my children. I had one child—a girl—that died when she was eight months old. I taught all my boys the carpenter trade, and they all work and stay right here at home with me.”
Living Conditions during and Immediately after Slavery
“There are two quarters that I used to visit with my grandmother when I was a little boy. The boss’s house was built so that he could stand on the porch of his house and see anything on the place, even in the slave quarters. The houses were all built out of logs. The roof was put on with what they called rib poles. They built the cable and cut each beam shorter than the other. They laid the boards across them and put a big log on top of them to weight them down, so that the wind couldn’t blow the planks off. They were home-made planks. They didn’t have no nails. They had nothing but dirt floors.
“Where the men folks were thrifty when they wanted to, they would go out at night and split the logs into slabs and then level them as much as they could and use those for floors. All the colored folks’ were split log floors if there were any floors at all. There was no lumber then. The planks were made with whipsaws and water-mills. I was a grown man before I ever saw a steam mill. The quarters that I saw were those that were built in slave time.
“If cracks were too big, they would put a pole in the crack and fill up the rest of it with mud—that is what they called chink and dob. The doors were hung on wooden hinges. They would bore a hole through the hinge and through the door and put a wooden pin in it in place of screws. There wasn’t a nail or a screw in the whole house when it was finished. They did mortise and tenon joints—all frame houses. Where we use nails now, if they had to, they would bore a hole and drive in a pin—wooden pin.”
Furniture
“The colored folks would put a post out from the corner and bore a hole and put the other end in it. They wouldn’t have any slats but would just lay boards across the side and put wheat or oat straw on the boards. The women made all the quilts. What I mean, they carded the rolls, spun the thread—spun it on an old hand-turned wheel—and then they would reel it off of the broach onto the reel and make hanks out of it. Then they would run it off on what they called quills. Then it would go ’round a big pin and come out with the threads separated. Then they would run through something like a comb and that would make the cloth.