Mah life wuz hard an’ sad, but now I’m comfortable here with kind friens.  I can’t read or write, but I surely enjoy de radio.  Some nights I dream about de old slave times an’ I hear dem cryin’ an’ prayin’, “Oh, Mastah, pray Oh, mastah, mercy!” when dey are bein’ whipped, an’ I wake up cryin.’  I set here in dis room and can remember mos’ all of de old life, can see it as plain as day, de hard work, de plantation, de whippings, an’ de misery.  I’m sure glad it’s all over.

James Immel, Reporter

Folklore
Washington County, District Three

Sarah woods Burke
Aged 85

“Yessir, I guess you all would call me an ex-slave cause I was born in Grayson County, West Virginia and on a plantation I lived for quite a spell, that is until when I was seven years old when we all moved up here to Washington county.”

“My Pappy’s old Mammy was supposed to have been sold into slavery when my Pappy was one month old and some poor white people took him ter raise.  We worked for them until he was a growed up man, also ’til they give him his free papers and ’lowed him to leave the plantation and come up here to the North.”

“How did we live on the plantation?  Well—­you see it was like this we lived in a log cabin with the ground for floors and the beds were built against the walls jus’ like bunks.  I ’member that the slaves had a hard time getting food, most times they got just what was left over or whatever the slaveholder wanted to give them so at night they would slip outa their cabins on to the plantation and kill a pig, a sheep or some cattle which they would butcher in the woods and cut up.  The wimmin folks would carry the pieces back to the cabins in their aprons while the men would stay behind and bury the head, skin and feet.”

“Whenever they killed a pig they would have to skin it, because they didn’t dare to build a fire.  The women folk after getting home would put the meat in special dug trenches and the men would come erlong and cover it up.”

“The slave holders in the port of the country I came from was men and it was quite offen that slaves were tied to a whipping stake and whipped with a blacksnake until the blood ran down their bodies.”

“I remembers quite clearly one scene that happened jus’ afore I left that there part of the country.  At the slaveholders home on the plantation I was at it was customary for the white folks to go to church on Sunday morning and to leave the cook in charge.  This cook had a habit of making cookies and handing them out to the slaves before the folks returned.  Now it happened that on one Sunday for some reason or tother the white folks returned before the regular time and the poor cook did not have time to get the cookies to the slaves so she just hid then in a drawer that was in a sewing chair.”