Mother’s Occupation
“My mother was a great weaver. She would weave cloth for the hands on the place. Some days she would work around the house and some other days she’d go out and weave. When they wasn’t any weaving or spinning to be done, she’d go out in the field. The weaving and the spinning was right in the white folks’ house.”
Own Occupation
“I used to be a preacher. Don’t do much of nothin’ now. Ain’t able. Get a little help from the Welfare—a little groceries sometimes. Don’t get any pension. You see, I can’t do much on account of my blindness.”
Opinions of Young People
“I can’t tell you what I think of the young people. Times have got to be so fast. It is just terrible to think how this life is. So much change from forty to fifty years ago. Just as much difference on both sides, white and colored, as there is between chalk and cheese.”
Praying Under Pots
“When they’d go to have a church meeting, they turn up the pot so that the noise wouldn’t come out. They could go to the white folks’ church. But the spirit would come on them sometimes to have service themselves. Then they’d go down to the house at night and turn up those big old iron pots and master never would hear. They wouldn’t put the washpot flat on the ground. They’d put sticks under it and raise it up about a foot from the ground. If they’d put it flat on the ground the ground would carry the sound.”
Voting
“There weren’t no voting at all in slavery times (in his locality—ed.) that is, far as the niggers were concerned. But after everybody was free you could vote up until they stopped the people from voting. They kept a Republican ticket in then. There wasn’t no Democrat. None like they is now. I don’t know how this thing got mixed up like it is now.