Houses, Food, Clothes
“The slaves lived in log huts on the plantations. Some men would weatherboard them. They didn’t put any ceiling in. You could lay back in your bed and see the moon and stars shining through.
“Some got good food and some of the owners would make the Niggers steal their food from other folks. Old Myers Green would make his Niggers steal and he would say, ‘If you get caught, I’ll kill you.’ One or two of them let themselves get caught, and he would whip them. That was to save him from paying for it. They couldn’t do anything to you but whip you nohow. But they could make him pay for it.
“They used homemade clothes made out of homemade cotton cloth. They would spin the cotton to a thread. When they would get so many broaches of it, they would make it into cloth. A broach was just a lot of thread wound around a stick. They would take it to the wheel and make the cloth, them women used to have tasks:—spinning, weaving, dressmaking, and so on. Sometimes they would have five and six spinning wheels running before they would get to the weaving.
“I don’t know who made the clothes. But you know them Niggers made them. They used to learn some slaves how to do some things,—the right way. Jus’ like they learned themselves. There was plenty of nice seamstresses. The white folks used to make them make clothes for their children. The white folks wouldn’t do nothin’. They wouldn’t even turn down the bed to get in it.”
Ages
“Colored folks in slavery times didn’t know how old they was. When you would buy a drove of darkies, you would go by what they would tell you, but they didn’t know how old they was. Some of those Niggers they bought from Africa wouldn’t take nothin’ neither.
“They would say: ‘Me goin’ do what you say do, but me aint goin’ to get no whipping.’ And when they whipped them, there was trouble.
“The masters kept records of ages of those born in their care. Some of them did. Some of them didn’t keep nothin’. Jus’ like people nowadays. Raised them like pigs and hogs. Jus’ didn’t care.”