“Me?  I was born on Green river near Hartford, Kentucky.  Guess I was about a year and a half, from what they told me when my mistress married.  Don’t know how she ever met my master.  She was raised in a convent and his folks lived a long way from hers.  But anyhow she did.  She was just 13 when she married.  The man she married was named Charles Mooreman M-O-O-R-E-M-A-N.  They had a son called Charles Wycliff Mooreman.  He was named for his mother’s people.  I got a son I called Charles Wycliff too.  He works at the Arlington.  He’s a waiter.  They say he looks just like me.  Mr. Charles Wycliff Mooreman—­back in Kentucky.  I still gets letters from him.

“Miss Mary I guess I had a pretty easy time in slavery days.  They was good to us.  Besides I was a house niggah.” (Those who have been “house niggahs” never quibble at the word slave or negro.  A subtle social distinction brewed in the black race to separate house servants from field hands as far as wealthy planters from “poor white trash.".) “Once I heard a man say of my mother, ’You could put on a white boiled shirt and lie flat down on the floor in her kitchen and not get dirty.’”

“Cook?  No, ma’am!” (with dignity and indignation) “I never cooked until after I was married, and I never washed, never washed so much as a rag.  All I washed was the babies and maybe my mistress’s feet.  I was a lady’s maid.  I’d wait on my mistress and I’d knit sox for all the folks.  When they would sleep it was our duty—­us maids—­to fan ’em with feathers made out of turkey feathers—­feather fans.  Part of it was to keep ’em cool.  Then they didn’t have screens like we have today.  So part of it was to keep the flies off.  I remember how we couldn’t stomp our feet to keep the flies from biting for fear of waking ’em up.

“No, Miss Mary, we didn’t get such, good food.  Nobody had all the kinds of things we have today.  We had mostly buttermilk and cornbread and fat meat.  Cake?  ’Deed we didn’t.  I remember once they baked a cake and Mr. Charles Wycliff—­he was just a little boy—­he got in and took a whole fistful out of the cake.  When Miss found out about it, she give us all doses of salts—­enough to make us all throw up.  She gave it to all the niggahs and the children—­the white children.  And what did she find out?  It was her own child who had done it.

“Yes ma’am we learned to read and write.  Oh, Miss Maude now—­I don’t want to recite.  I don’t want to.” (But she did “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and “The Playful Kitten”—­the latter all of 40 lines.) “I think, I think they both come out of McGuffey’s second Reader.  Yes ma’am I remember’s McGuffey’s and the Blueback speller too.

“No, Miss Mary, there wasn’t so much of the war that was fought around us.  I remember that old Master used to go out in the front yard and stand by a locust tree and put his ear against it.  He said that way he could hear the cannon down to Bowling Green.  No, I didn’t never hear any shooting from the war myself.