“They didn’t force nobody to marry. They might force you to marry if both of you had the same master, but not if they belonged to different masters. They were crazy about slaves that had a lot of children.
“Niggers didn’t separate in slave times because they never was married except by word of mouth. There was a lot of old souls that came out of slavery times that lived together and raised children that never was married (except by word of mouth), just got together. But they made out better and were better husbands and wives and raised better families than they do now.
“Sometimes folks would get separated when the slave traders would sell them, and sometimes families would get separated when their white folks died or would run into debt.”
Slave Sales
“They had a slave block in Georgia. You see they would go to Virginia and get the people that they would bring across the water—regular Africans. Sometimes they would refugee them four or five hundred miles before they would get the chance to sell them. Sometimes a woman would have a child in her arms. A man would buy the mother and wouldn’t want the child. And then sometimes a woman would holler out: ‘Don’t sell that pickaninny.’ (You know they didn’t call colored children nothin’ but Pickaninnies then.) ‘I want that little pickaninny.’ And the mother would go one way and the child would go the other. The mother would be screaming and hollering, and of course, the child wouldn’t be saying nothin’ because it didn’t know what was goin’ on.
“They had a sale block in my home (Fort Valley, Georgia), and I used to go and see the Niggers sold often. Some few wasn’t worth nothin’ at all—just about a hundred dollars. But they generally ran about five or six hundred dollars. Some of them would bring thousands of dollars. It depended on their looks. The trader would say, ‘Look at those shoulders; look at those muscles.’
“Someone would holler out, ‘A thousand dollars.’
“Then another would holler out, ‘Fifteen hundred.’
“They went like horses. A fine built woman would bring a lot of money. A woman that birthed children cost a heap.
“Virginia was where the slaves would be brought first. The slave traders would go there and get them and take them across the country in droves—just like you take a drove of cattle. They would sell them as they would come to sale blocks. The slaves would be undressed from the shoulders to the waist.”