"In Ku Klux times, I met five or ten of them in the road one night. They never bothered me. They had long white sheets over them and the horses. Slits were cut for the head, eyes, nose and mouth.
"The niggers had an old field song: 'Give me dat good ole time religion' which they sang most of the time. There was another song they sang: 'Dark midnight is my cry—Give me Jesus, You may have all this world, but give me Jesus.'
"Some old-time cures for the sick was—barks of cherry tree, dogwood, and olive bush, made into tea and drunk.
"I thought Abe Lincoln was a fine man, done mighty good and saved the country. Jeff Davis was a good man. Booker Washington was a great man. I think slavery was bad; yet our white folks was good to us, but some white masters was mean. I think everybody should belong to the church and be a Christian."
SOURCE: Morgan Scurry (78), Newberry, S.C.; interviewed by:
G.L. Summer. Newberry, S.C. May 19, 1937.
S-260-264-N
Project #935
Hattie Mobley
Richland County
South Carolina
Uncle Ransom Simmons
Richland County, South Carolina.
Uncle Ransom is one of the few remaining slaves who still lives and whose mind is still clear and active. He has just passed his one-hundred and fourth birthday, was born in Mississippi, and brought to South Carolina by his master Wade Hampton, the father of the illustrious General Wade Hampton, before the Civil War.
When the war broke out and General Wade Hampton went to war Uncle Ransom cried to be allowed to follow his young master. He went and served as a body guard. Uncle Ransom learned to read the Bible while attending a night school held for slaves before freedom, and it was only in recent years that he was taught to write his name.
This old man lives alone in a shack at Taylor, a little village on the outskirts of Columbia. He is furnished with all the milk and ice cream he can eat by the Columbia Dairy. He purchases a little food with the state pension of twenty-five dollars a year paid to Negroes who served the Confederacy in some military capacity.