“I’ve told you the slaves were tasked to the limit. The hours of the slave hands—if it was summer time—he must be in the field when the sun rose. And he must come home and eat his dinner and get back in the field and stay till the sun went down. In the winter time he must be out there by the time it was light enough to see the work and stay out till it was just too dark to see the work with just enough time out to stop and eat his dinner. This was just after slavery that I remember. But the hours were the same then. The average on cotton picking was two hundred pounds a day. Pulling fodder was a hundred bundles. Gathering corn and such as that was all they could do.”
Wages just after Freedom
“The average wage that a man got for twenty-six days’ work—twenty-six days were counted a working month—was eight dollars and board for the month. That was the average wage for work like that. That is the way they worked then.”
This Matter of Slave Clothes Again
“Clothes!!! They didn’t know nothing ’bout underclothes. They didn’t wear them just after the War, and I know they didn’t before the War—not in my part of Alabama. That’s the reason why they say the Negro is cold natured. He didn’t have anything on. I have seen many a boy picking and chopping cotton on a cold autumn day with nothing on but his shirt. In his bare feet too. He got one pair of shoes a year and he didn’t get no more. When he wore them out, he didn’t have any till the next year.
“When I was a boy I have seen many a young lady walk to church with her shoes flung over her shoulders and wait till she got nearly there before she would put them on. She didn’t want to wear them out too soon.
“I didn’t have to undergo this myself.
“When I was ten years old, my job was to drive a team twenty-six miles, and it took me two days to go and two days to come and one day to load and unload—five days. The team was loaded with cotton going and anything coming back. We used to get salt from some place near New Orleans. We would drive ox teams down there, put in on order, wait till they dipped the water out of the lake, boiled the salt out of it, and packed it up. There was no such thing as mining salt like they do now. It would take from August first till about the middle of September to get it. Ox team won’t make more than about twelve miles a day. The people would make up a wagon train and go and come together. People in those days didn’t believe a horse would pull anything but a buggy, so they used steers mostly for heavy pulling. They ran all gins and thrashers by horse power and the running gear was all made out of wood. A lot of people say you couldn’t make a wooden cotton press that would pack a bale of cotton. You can make a wooden press that will break a bale in two. Of course the gin was made out of metal. But they made the press out of wood.”
Slave Schooling
“The slaves were not allowed to learn anything. Sometimes one would be shrewd enough to get in with the white children and they would teach him his a-b-c’s, and after he learnet to spell he would steal books and get out and learn the rest for himself.”