"Aunt" Mary's oldest child is now a man of 74. Her hair is as white as cotton and her eye sight is dim, but she is still mentally alert. She says that colored people are naturally religious and that they learned all their "devilment" from the Whites. She deplores the wickedness into which the world has drifted, but thanks God that slavery ended when it did.
She has never had any particular love for the Yankees, and thinks that they treated the Southern white folks "most scandalously" after the war, yet feels that she owes them a debt of gratitude for freeing her people. She admits that her awful hatred of slavery was born of her sad experience as a girl when she was so unceremoniously separated from her loved ones, as previously told. She is also of the firm opinion the those "speculataws" who brought her from Maryland to Georgia in 1860 are "brilin in hell fur dey sin" of seperating her from her people.
Must Jesus bear the cross alone
and all the world go free?
No, there is a cross for every one;
there's a cross for me;
This consecrated cross I shall bear til
death shall set me free,
And then go home, my crown to wear;
there is a crown for me.
Sung for interviewer by Mary Ferguson, ex-slave, December 18, 1936.
FOLKLORE INTERVIEW
CARRIE NANCY FRYER
415 Mill Street
Augusta, Georgia
Written by:
Miss Maude Barragan
Federal Writers' Project
Residency #13
Augusta, Georgia
An angular, red-skinned old Negro women was treading heavily down the dusty sidewalk, leaning on a gnarled stick and talking to a little black girl. A "sundown" hat shaded a bony face of typical Indian cast and her red skin was stretched so tight over high cheek bones that few wrinkles showed.
"Auntie," she was asked, "have you time to tell me something about slavery times?" "No'm, I sorry," she answered, "but I gwine to see a sick lady now, and I gots to 'tend to somepin'." "May I come back to see you at your house?" "Yas'm, any time you wants. I live in de lil' house on de canal, it has a ellum tree in front. I riz it from sapling. I name dat lil' tree 'Nancy' so when I gone, folks kin come by and bow and say 'Howdy, Nancy.'"
She seated herself on a stone step and spread her many skirts of gray chambray, hand-sewed with big white stitches. An old woman came by, her shining black face puckered with anxiety, dressed in a starched white uniform and a battered black hat, well brushed.