“He’m drunk and fell off him hoss.”
The public sentiment of the listening crowd seemed to decide that inquiries had been pressed far enough in that direction. I next fell back on something they were all interested in.
“Would you work for five dollars a month?”
He seemed a little puzzled, but thought he wouldn’t, “harly.”
“Would you work for ten?”
“Spec I would, sah.”
“Would you stick at it, if a man hired you?”
“Ya-a-a-s. Ef I once ’mence, and git money, I’s wuck on. Jis git me money an’ I wucks.”
I wrote this conversation down carefully at the time. The negro may fairly be taken as a sample of the most ignorant plantation hands, in the interior of the poorest cotton-growing districts, and the conversation may therefore have a certain value, as showing the lowest degree of intelligence among the class on whom it is proposed to confer the right of suffrage.