"Uncle Billy" reads his Bible quite often. He sometimes wonders why he is still left here—all of his friends are gone; all his brothers and sisters are gone. But this he believes is the solution—that there must be someone left to tell about old times.
"The Bible," he quotes, "says that two shall be working in the field together and one shall be taken and the other left. I am the one who is left," he concludes.
Henrietta Karwowski, Field Worker
Federal Writers' Project
St. Joseph County—District #1
South Bend, Indiana
EX-SLAVES
MR. AND MRS. ALEX SMITH
127 North Lake Street
South Bend, Indiana
Mr. and Mrs. Alex Smith, an eighty-three year old negro couple were slaves in Kentucky near Paris, Tennessee, as children. They now reside at 127 North Lake Street, on the western limits of South Bend. This couple lives in a little shack patched up with tar paper, tin, and wood.
Mrs. Elizabeth Smith, the talkative member or the family is a small woman, very wrinkled, with a stocking cap pulled over her gray hair. She wore a dress made of three different print materials; sleeves of one kind, collar of another and body of a third. Her front teeth were discolored, brown stubs, which suggested that she chews tobacco.
Mr. Alex Smith, the husband is tall, though probably he was a well built man at one time. He gets around by means of a cane. Mrs. Smith said that he is not at all well, and he was in the hospital for six weeks last winter.
The wife, Elizabeth or Betty, as her husband calls her, was a slave on the Peter Stubblefield plantation in Kentucky, the nearest town being Paris, Tennessee, while Mr. Smith was a slave on the Robert Stubblefield plantation nearby.
Although only a child of five, Mr. Smith remembers the Civil War, especially the marching of thousands of soldiers, and the horse-drawn artillery wagons. The Stubblefields freed their slaves the first winter after the war.