When I was a boy I played with other slave children and sometimes with the master's children and what little education I have I got from them. No, I can't read or write but I can figure 'like the devil'.
The plantation of John Jefferson was one of the biggest in the south, it had 2200 acres and he owned about 2000 slaves.
I was too young to remember anything about the slave days although I do remember that I never saw a pair of shoes until I was old enough to work. My father was a cobbler and I used to have to whittle out shoe pegs for him and I had to walk sometimes six miles to get pine knots which we lit at night so my mother could see to work.
I did not stay with my father and mother long as I was only about 14 when I started north. I worked for farmers every place I could find work and sometimes would work a month or maybe two. The last farmer I worked for I stayed a year and I got my board and room and five dollars a month which was paid at the end of every six months. I stayed in Pennsylvania for some years and came to Canton in 1884. I have always worked at farm work except now and then in a factory.
I had two brothers, Dan and Tom, and one sister, Dora, but I never heard from them or saw them after the war. I have been married twice. My first wife was Sally Dillis Blaire and we were married in 1889. I got a divorce a few years later and I don't know whatever became of her. My second wife is still living. Her name was Kattie Belle Reed and I married her in 1907. No, I never had any children.
I don't believe I had a bed when I was a slave as I don't remember any. At home, after the war, my mother and father's bed was made of wood with ropes stretched across with a straw tick on top. 'Us kids' slept under this bed on a 'trundle' bed so that at night my mother could just reach down and look after any one of us if we were sick or anything.
I was raised on ash cakes, yams and butter milk. These ash cakes were small balls made of dough and my mother would rake the ashes out of the fire place and lay these balls on the hot coals and then cover them over with the ashes again. When they were done we would take 'em out, clean off the ashes and eat them. We used to cook chicken by first cleaning it, but leaving the feathers on, then cover it with clay and lay it in a hole filled with hot coals. When it was done we would just knock off the clay and the feathers would come off with it.
When I was a 'kid' I wore nothing but a 'three cornered rag' and my mother made all my clothes as I grew older. No, the slaves never knew what underwear was.
We didn't have any clocks to go by; we just went to work when it was light enough and quit when it was too dark to see. When any slaves took sick they called in a nigger mammy who used roots and herbs, that is, unless they were bad sick, then the overseer would call a regular doctor.
When some slave died no one quit work except relatives and they stopped just long enough to go to the funeral. The coffins were made on the plantation, these were just rough pine board boxes, and the bodies were buried in the grave yard on the plantation.