“My father spent a fortune in it but I never could see that it benefited him. I never did care for any kind of office except a mail contract that I had once to haul mail. I went through that successfully and never lost a pouch or anything but at the end of the year I throwed it up. I couldn’t trust anyone else to handle it for me and I had to meet trains at all hours. The longest I could sleep was two or three hours a night, so I gave it up at the end of the year.”
Care of Old People
“Some of the masters treated us worse than dogs and others treated us fine. Colonel Robert Willingham freed his slaves but his sisters and brothers wouldn’t stand for it. They went and stole us off and sold us. My mother being a thrifty colored woman and a practical nurse, everywhere she went, a case gave thirty dollars and her board and mine. My father paid his master three hundred dollars a year. He built these gin houses and presses. The old man would write him passes and everything and see that he was paid for his work. Some years, he would make as much as three or four thousand dollars. His master collected it and held it for him and gave it to him when he wanted it. That was during slavery times.”
Opinion of the Present
“Slavery days were hard but in the same time the colored people fared better than now because the white folks taken up for them and they raised what they needed to eat. You couldn’t go nowhere but what people had plenty to eat. Now they can’t do it.
“I know what caused it too. The Jews didn’t have much privilege till after the Negro was emancipated. They used to kill Jews and bury them in the woods. But after emancipation, he began to rise. First he began to lend money on small interest. Then he started another scheme. People used to not have sense. They went to work and got in with the Southern white folks and got a law passed about the fences.
“The Greeks and Italians are next to the Jews. They don’t make much off the white man; they make it off the Negro. They come ’round and open up a place and beg the niggers to come in; and when they get up a little bit, they shut out the niggers and don’t want nothin’ but white folks. It’s a good thing they do, too; because if somebody didn’t shut the Negro out, he’d never have anything.
“The slaveholders were hard, but those people who come here from across the water, they bring our trouble. You can’t squeeze as much out of the poor white as you can out of the darkey. The darkey is spending too much now—when he can get hold of it. Everywhere you see a darkey with a home, he’s got a government mortgage on it. Some day the government will start foreclosing and then the darkeys won’t have anything, and the biggest white man won’t have much.
“A hundred years from now, they won’t be any such thing as Negroes. There will be just Americans. The white people are mixed up with Greeks, Germans, and Italians and everything else now. There are mighty few pure Americans now. There used to be plenty of them right after the War.
“The country can’t hold out under this relief system.