20.  What did they use for dyeing thread and cloth, and how did they dye them?

They would dig indigo roots and cook the roots and branches for blue dye.  For purple they mixed red and blue.  They would pick the berries off the gallberry bushes for red.  The robin’s yellow and mixed yellow and red for orange; and yellow and blue for green.

21.  Did your mother use big, wooden washtubs with cut-out holes on each side for the fingers?

Yes.  We made cedar tubs on the plantation.  And we had some men who made large wooden bowls out of juggles cut from logs of the tupla tree.  They would run them through a machine and they would come out round and then they would smooth them down.  They mixed bread in those big bowls.

22.  Do you remember the way they made shoes by hand in the country?

Yes, all our shoes were made on the plantation.

23.  Do you remember saving the chicken feathers and goose feathers always for your featherbeds?

Yes.

24.  Do you remember when women wore hoops in their skirts, and when they stopped wearing them and wore narrow skirts?

Yes.  The doctor’s folks were so stylish that they would not let the servants wear hoops, but we could get the old ones that they threw away and have a big time playing with them and we would go around with them on when they were gone and couldn’t see us.

25.  Do you remember when you first saw your first windmill?

Never did see one.

26.  Do you remember when you first saw bed springs instead of bed ropes?

Yes.  When I was a slave, I slept in a gunny sack bunk with the sacks nailed against the wall on two sides, in a corner of the room and then there was a post at the corner of the bed and two poles nailed from the post to the walls and the gunny sacks were nailed to those poles.  My bed was a two-story bed.  There was another gunnysack bed above me with poles fastened to the same post.  We tore old rags and made rag rugs for quilts to cover us with.  I worked in the doctor’s house in the daytime but I had to sleep in the shed at night.  Then after I wasn’t a slave no more, I never slept on anything else but a rope bed.  When springs come I wondered what anyone wanted wid ’em.  Rope beds was good enough.

27.  When did you see the first buggy and what did it look like?

The doctor, he had the best of such things.  He had a regular buggy and sometimes he driv two horses in hit.  Uncle Albert, he wuz his driver.  When the doctor wanted to put on great style, and go to the station to meet some rich company he had one of the fancy cabs with the driver sittin’ up high in front, but when he went to see his patients, he’d take his feet to go around.  He had two saddle packs with a strap that he would throw over his shoulder.  He would have one pack hanging in front and the other hanging behind.

28.  Do you remember your grandparents?