How the Little Children Were Fed
“My mother was always right in the house with the white people and I was fed just like I was one of their children. They even done put me to bed with them. You see, this discrimination on color wasn’t as bad then as it is now. They handled you as a slave but they didn’t discriminate against you on account of color like they do now. Of course, there were brutal masters then just like there are brutal people now. Louisiana and Alabama and Mississippi always were tough states on colored people. South Carolina and Georgia got that way after people from those places came in and taught them to mistreat colored people. Yet in Alabama and Louisiana where they colored people were worse treated, it seems that they got hold of more property and money. Same way it was in Mississippi.”
Patrollers
“The patrollers was just a set of mean men organized in every section of the country. If they’d catch a nigger out and he didn’t have a pass, they’d tie him up and whip him and then they’d take him back. You had to have a pass to be out at night. Even in the daytime you couldn’t go no great distance without a pass. Them big families—rich families—that had big plantations would come together and the niggers from two or three places might go to a church on one of them. But you couldn’t go no place where there wasn’t a white man looking on.”
Reading and Writing in Slave Time
“Some of the white people thought so much of their slaves that they would teach them how to write and read. But they would teach them secretly and they would teach them not to read or write out where anybody would notice them. They didn’t mind you reading as much as they minded you writing. If they’d catch YOU now and it was then, they’d take you out and chop off them fingers you’re doing that writing with.”
Slave Occupation and Wages
“My daddy was a builder. Old man Willingham gave him freedom and time to work on his own account. He gave him credit for what work he done for him. He got three hundred dollars a year for my father’s time, but all the money was collected by him, because my father being a slave couldn’t collect any money from anybody. When my father’s master died, he may have had money deposited with him. But he was strictly honest with my father. No matter how much he collected, he wouldn’t take no more’n three hundred dollars and he put all the rest to the credit of my father. He said three hundred dollars was enough to take.”
How Freedom Came
“The owners went to work and notified the slaves that they were free. After the proclamation was issued, the government had agents who went all through the country to see if the slaves had been freed. They would see how the proclamation was being carried out. They would ask them, ‘How are you working?’ ‘You are free.’ ‘What are you getting?’ Some of them would say, ‘I ain’t gettin’ nothin’ now.’ Well, the agent would take that up and they would have that owner up before the government. Maybe he would be working people for a year and giving them nothin’ before they found him out. There are some places where they have them cases yet. Where they have people on the place and ain’t paying them nothin’.”