“Then the mother would go and get the children and bring them home.  She would cook for supper and feed them.  She’d have to go somewheres and get them.  Maybe the children would be asleep before she would get all that done.  Then she would have to wake them up and feed them.

“I remember one time my sister and me were laying near the fire asleep and my sister kicked the pot over and burned me from my knee to my foot.  My old master didn’t have no wife, so he had me carried up to the house and treated by the old woman who kept the house for him.  She was a slave.  When I got so I could hobble around a little, he would sometimes let the little niggers come up to the house and I would get these big peanuts and break them up and throw them out to them so he could have fun seeing them scramble for them.

“After the children had been fed, the mother would cook the next day’s breakfast and she would cook the next day’s dinner and put it in the pail so that everything would be ready when the riding boss would come around.  Cause when he came, it meant move.

The Old Lady at the Big House

“The old lady at the big house took care of the gourds and bowls.  The parents didn’t have nothing to do with them.  She fed the children that was weaned.  Mother and daddy didn’t have nothing to do with that at noontime because they was in the field.  White folks fed them corn bread and milk.  Up to the big house besides that, she didn’t have anything to do except take care of things around the house, keep the white man’s things clean and do his cooking.

“She never carried the gourds and bowls herself.  She just fixed them.  The yard man brought them down to the quarters and we would take them back.  She wash them and scrape them till they was white and thin as paper.  They was always clean.

“She wasn’t related to me.  I couldn’t call her name to save my life.

Relatives

“We come from Barbour, Alabama with a trainful of people that were immigrating.  We just chartered a train and came, we had so many.  Of all the old people that came here in that time, my aunt is the oldest.  You will find her out on Twenty-fourth Street and Pulaski.  She has been my aunt ever since I can remember.  She must be nearly a hundred or more.

Patrollers

“When we had the patrollers it was just like the white man would have another white man working for him.  It was to see that the Negroes went to bed on time and didn’t steal nothing.  But my master and missis never allowed anybody to whip their slaves.

What the Slaves Expected and Got

“I don’t know what the slaves was expecting to get, but my parents when they left Ben See’s place had nothing but the few clothes in the house.  They didn’t give em nothing.  They had some clothes all right, enough to cover themselves.  I don’t know what kind or how much because I wasn’t old enough to know all into such details.