Self-Support and Support of Aged Slaves in Slave Times

“A white man asked me how much they givin’ me.  I said, ‘Eight dollars.’  He said, ‘You ought to be gittin’ twenty-five.’  I said, ’Maybe I ought to be but I ain’t.’

“I ain’t able to do no work now.  I ain’t able to tote that wood hardly.  I don’t git as much consideration as they give the slaves back yonder.  They didn’t make the old people in slavery work when they was my age.  My daddy when he was my age, they turned him out.  They give him a rice patch where he could make his rice.  When he died, he had a whole lot of rice.  They stopped putting all the slaves out at hard labor when they got old.  That’s one thing.  White folks will take care of their old ones.  Our folks won’t do it.  They’ll take a stick and kill you.  They don’t recognize you’re human.  Their parents don’t teach them.  Folks done quit teaching their children.  They don’t teach them the right thing no more.  If they don’t do, then they ought to make them do.

Little Rock

“I been here about twenty years in Little Rock.  I went and bought this place and paid for it.  Somebody stole seventy-five dollars from me right here in this house.  And that got me down.  I ain’t never been able to git up since.

“I paid a man for what he did for me.  He said, ’Well, you owe me fifteen cents.’  When he got done he said, ‘You owe me fifty cents.’  You can’t trust a man in the city.

“I was living down in England.  That’s a little old country town.  I come here to Little Rock where I could be in a city.  I done well.  I bought this place.

“I reckon I lived in Arkansas about thirty years before I left and come here to Little Rock.  When I left Georgia, I come to Arkansas and settled down in Lonoke County, made crops there.  I couldn’t tell you how long I stayed there.  I didn’t keep no record of it at all.  I come out of Lonoke County and went into Jefferson.

“Man, I was never in such shape as I am in now.  That devilish stock law killed me.  It killed all the people.  Nobody ain’t been able to do nothin’ since they passed the stock law.  I had seventy-five hogs and twenty cows.  They made a law you had to keep them chickens up, keep them hogs up, keep them cows up.  They shoots at every right thing, and the wrong things they don’t shoot at.  God don’t uphold no man to set you up in the jail when you ain’t done nothin’.  You didn’t have no privilege then (slave time), and you ain’t got none now.”

Interviewer:  Pernella Anderson, colored.

El Dorado Division
Federal Writers’ Project
Union County.  Arkansas

EX-SLAVE AND RIDDLES