“No ma’am, I was never married.  I don’t believe in getting married unless you got plenty of money.  So many married folks dont do nuthin but fuss and fight.  Even my father and mother always spatted and I never liked that and so I says to myself what do I want to get married for.  I’m happier just living by myself.”

“Yes Ma’am.  I remember when people used to take wagon loads of corn to the market in Louisville, and they would bring back home lots of groceries and things.  A colored man told me he had come north to the market in Louisville with his master, and was working hard unloading the corn when a white man walks up to him, shows him some money and asks him if he wanted to be free?  He said he stopped right then and went with the man, who hid him in his wagon under the provisions and they crossed the Ohio River right on the ferry.  That’s the way lots of ’em got across here.”

“Did I ever hear of any ghosts.  Yes ma’am I have.  I hear noises and I seed something once that I never could figger out.  I was goin’t thru the woods one day, and come up sudden in a clear patch of ground.  There sat a little boy on a stump, all by his-self, there in the woods.  I asks him who he wuz & wuz he lost, and he never answered me.  Jest sat there, lookin at me.  All of a sudden he ups and runs, and I took out after him.  He run behind a big tree, and when I got up to where I last seed him, he wuz gone.  And there sits a great big brown man twice as big as me, on another stump.  He never seys a word, jest looks at me.  And then I got away from there, yes ma’am I really did.”

“A man I knew saw a ghost once and he hit at it.  He always said he wasn’t afraid of no ghost, but that ghost hit him, and hit him so hard it knocked his face to one side and the last time I saw him it was still that way.  No ma’am, I don’t really believe in ghosts, but you know how it is, I lives by myself and I don’t like to talk about them for you never can tell what they might do.

“Lady you ought to hear me rattle bones, when I was young.  I caint do it much now for my wrists are too stiff.  When they played Turkey in the Straw how we all used to dance and cut up.  We’ed cut the pigeon wing, and buck the wind [HW:  wing?], and all.  But I got rewmaytism in my feet now and ant much good any more, but I sure has done lots of things and had lots of fun in my time.”

Federal Writers’ Project
of the W.P.A. 
District #6
Marion County
Anna Pritchett
1200 Kentucky Avenue, Indianapolis, Indiana

Folklore
Joseph Mosley, ex-slave
2637 Boulevard Place

[TR:  Also reported as Moseley in text of interview.]

Joseph Mosley, one of twelve children, was born March 15, 1853, fourteen miles from Hopkinsville, Kentucky.

His master, Tim Mosley, was a slave trader.  He was supposed to have bought and sold 10,000 slaves.  He would go from one state to another buying slaves, bringing in as many as 75 or 80 slaves at one time.