“It was the rule in slave time to card one hundred rolls. Sometimes they would be up till after twelve o’clock at night. They carded that in one night and spun it the next night. Start with old cotton just like it come from the gin. Card it one night and spin it the next. Done wool and cotton the same way. One hundred rolls carded gave enough threads to make a yard of cloth.
“In them days they tasked everybody to the limit.”
Stoves
“For stoves they used an iron pot on a big fire. In the kitchen, they had a fireplace built ten feet wide. They had things they called pot racks hung down from the chimney, and they would hang pots on them. They put the pots on those hooks and not on the logs. When they baked bread they would use iron skillets—North Carolina people called them spiders. They would put an iron lid on them and put fire over the top and underneath the skillet and bake good bread. I mean that old-time bread was good bread. They baked the light bread the same way. They baked biscuits once a week. Sunday mornings was about the only time you ever got them.”
Food in General (Slaves)
“In slavery times they had all kinds of meat—more than they have now—, vegetables and fruits too. They raised them themselves. There wasn’t no food issued. Didn’t need to be. One cook cooked it all in one kitchen and they all sat around the same big old long table long as a house. All the hands ate at the same table and in the same room and at the same time.
“The way they fed the children, they took pot-liquor or bean soup or turnip liquor or the juice from anything they boiled and poured it out in a great big wooden bowl and let all the children get ’round it like so many cats and they would just tip their hands in it and eat what they wanted. Of course they had all the milk they wanted because everybody raised cows. I didn’t have to undergo this myself, but this was what they had to undergo at the places where my grandmother took me to visit.”
Clothes
“A colored boy had to be more than twelve years old before he wore a pair of pants. He wore nothing but a long shirt that come down to his knees. The hands in slave time wore homemade shirts. All clothes were homemade—pants and coats and dresses and stockings and everything. The shoes were made out of harness leather. Tanned and made right by hand at home. I have seen tanning vats and yards two blocks square.”