“Her master often said, ’I’ll drink myself to death before I’ll go to war and be shot down like a damn target.’  She said in living with them in the house, she learned to cuss from him.  She said she was a cussin’ soul until she became a Christian.  She wasn’t ’fraid of them because she was kin to them in some way.  There was another woman there who was some kin to them and she looked enough like my grandma for them to be kin to each other.  We talked it over several times and said we believed we were related; but none of us know for sure.

“When the slaves wanted something said they would have my grandma say it because they knew she wouldn’t be whipped for it.  ‘White Ma’ wouldn’t let nobody whip her if she knew it.  She cussed the overseer out that time for whipping her.

“When grandma was fourteen or fifteen years old they locked her up in the seed house once or twice for not going to church.  You see they let the white folks go to the church in the morning and the colored folks in the evening, and my grandma didn’t always want to go.  She would be locked up in the seed bin and she would cuss the preacher out so he could hear her.  She would say, ‘Master, let us out.’  And he would say, ‘You want to go to church?’ And she would say, ’No, I don’t want to hear that same old sermon:  “Stay out of your missis’ and master’s hen house.  Don’t steal your missis’ and master’s chickens.  Stay out of your missis’ and master’s smokehouse.  Don’t steal your missis’ and master’s hams.”  I don’t steal nothing.  Don’t need to tell me not to.’

“She was tellin’ the truth too.  She didn’t steal because she didn’t have to.  She had plenty without stealin’!  She got plenty to eat in the house.  But the other slaves didn’t git nothin’ but fat meat and corn bread and molasses.  And they got tired of that same old thing.  They wanted something else sometimes.  They’d go to the hen house and get chickens.  They would go to the smokehouse and get hams and lard.  And they would get flour and anything else they wanted and they would eat something they wanted.  There wasn’t no way to keep them from it.

“The reason she got whipped that time, the overseer wanted her to help get a tree off the fence that had been blown down by a storm.  She told him that wasn’t her work and she wasn’t goin’ to do it.  Old miss was away at that time.  He hit her a few licks and she told old miss when she came back.  Old ‘White Ma’ told the overseer, ’Don’t never put your hands on her no more no matter what she does.  That’s more than I do.  I don’t hit her and you got no business to do it.’

“Her husband, my grandfather, was a blacksmith, and he never did work in the field.  He made wagons, plows, plowstocks, buzzard wings—­they call them turning plows now.  They used to make and put them on the stocks.  He made anything-handles, baskets.  He could fill wagon wheels.  He could sharpen tools.  Anything that come under the line of blacksmith, that is what he did.  He used to fix wagons all the time I knowed him.  In harvest time in the fall he would drive from Bienville where they were slaves to Monroe in Ouachita Parish.  He kept all the plows and was sharpening and fixing anything that got broke.  He said he never did get no whipping.