“I knew more about the slave-time history of my mother’s folks than I did about my father’s but I’ll tell you that some other time.  My grandmother on my mother’s side was born in Richmond, Virginia.  She was owned by a doctor but I can’t call his name.  She gets her name from her husband’s owners.  They came from Virginia.  They didn’t take the name of their owners in Louisiana.  They took the name of the owners in Virginia.  She was a twin—­her twin was a boy named June and her name was Hetty.  Her master kept her brother to be a driver for him.  She was sent from Virginia to Louisiana to people that were related to her Virginia people.  She called her Louisiana mistress ‘White Ma;’ she never did call her ‘missis.’  The white folks and the colored folks too called her Indian because she was mixed with Choctaw.  That’s the Indian that has brown spots on the jaw.  They’re brownskin.  It was an Indian from the Oklahoma reservation that said my mother belonged to the Choctaws.

“She rode from Virginia to Louisiana on a boat at the age of twelve years.  She was separated from her mother and brothers and sisters and never did see them again.  She was kept in the house for a nurse.  She was not a midwife.  She nursed the white babies.  That was what she was sent to Louisiana for—­to nurse the babies.  The Louisiana man that owned her was named George Dorkins.  But I think this white woman came from Virginia.  She married this Louisiana man, then sent back to her father’s house and got grandma; she got her for a nurse.  She worked only a year and a half in the field before peace was declared.  After she got grown and married, my grandfather—­she had to stay with him and cook and keep house for him.  That was during slavery time but after George Dorkins died.  Dorkins went and got hisself a barrel of whiskey—­one of these great big old barrels—­and set it up in his house, and put a faucet in it and didn’t do nothin’ but drink whiskey.  He said he was goin’ to drink hisself to death.  And he did.

“He was young enough to go to war and he said he would drink hisself to death before he would go, and he did.  My grandma used to steal newspapers out of his house and take them down to the quarters and leave them there where there were one or two slaves that could read and tell how the War was goin’ on.  I never did learn how the slaves learned to read.  But she was in the house and she could steal the papers and send them down.  Later she could slip off and they would tell her the news, and then she could slip the papers back.

“Her master drank so much he couldn’t walk without falling and she would have to help him out.  Her mistress was really good.  She never allowed the overseer to whip her.  She was only whipped once in slave time while my father’s mother was whipped more times than you could count.