“Old Tom Owens was my mother’s master. I just do remember him. My father’s master was named Tom Tuggle. My mother and my father got together by going different places and meeting. They went together till freedom and weren’t married except in the way they married in slavery. During slavery times, old master gave you to some one and that was all of it. My father asked my mother’s old master if he could go with my mother and old man Owens said yes. Then father went to her cabin to see her. When freedom came, he taken her to his place and married her accordin’ to the law.

“Aunt Mariny Tuggle was my father’s mother. I don’t know anything about his father. She has been dead! She died when I was young. I can remember her well, though.

“I can remember my mother’s mother. Her name was Eliza Whitelow. Her husband was named Jack Whitelow. They was my grandfather and my grandmother on my mother’s side. They old people. I can remember seeing them.

“I never saw my grandfather on my father’s side. That was way back in slavery time. I used to hear them say he was a guinea man. He was short. My own father was small too. But my father’s father was short as I am. I am about four and a half feet tall. (I stopped here and measured her, and she was exactly four feet six inches tall—ed.) I never heard nobody say where he came from. My father’s sisters were part Indian. Their hair was longer than that ruler you got in your hand there. It came down on their shoulders. They was a shade brighter than I am.

“My father’s mother was small too. His sisters were not whole sisters; their daddy was Indian.”

Occupation

“My father and his father and mother were all farmers. My mother and her mother were farmers too. All my people were long-lived. Grandpa, grandma, and all of them. I reckon there about a hundred children scattered back there in Tennessee. Brother’s children and sister’s children. I believe my folks would take care of me if they knew about my condition. These folks here are mean. Them folks would take care of me if I were home.”

Slave Houses

“The slaves lived in old log houses; just one room, one door, one window, one everything. They had any kind of furniture they could git. Some of them had old homemade beds and some of them one thing and another. You know the white folks wasn’t goin’ to give them no furniture.

“They had plenty of meat and bread and milk to eat. Coarse food—the commonest kind of food they could get ’hold of! When I knowed anything, I was in the big house eating the bes’ with the white folks. Some of them could live well then. My mama gave me to the Owenses—her old mistress. I was raised on a pallet in the house. I was in the house from the time I was large enough to be taken from my mother. I didn’t never do any work till I was married. Old mistress wouldn’t let me work. Just keep by her and hand her a drink of water, and on like that. She’s dead now—dead, dead, dead! They didn’t leave but two children, they was ’round in the country somewheres then I left there.