It was very unusual for a slave to receive any money whatsoever for working.  He said that his master had a son about his age, and the son and he and his brother worked around the farm together, and “Master Stone” gave all three of them ten cents a day when they worked.  Sometimes they wouldn’t, they would play instead.  And whenever “Master Stone” would catch them playing when they ought to have been at work, he would whip them—­“and that meant his own boy would get a licking too.”

“Old Master Stone was a good man to all us colored folks, we loved him.  He wasn’t one of those mean devils that was always beating up his slaves like some of the rest of them.”  He had a colored overseer and one day this overseer ran off and hid for two days “cause he whipped one of old Mas’ Stone’s slaves and he heard that Mas’ Stone was mad and he didn’t like it.”

“We didn’t know that we were slaves, hardly.  Well, my brother and I didn’t know anyhow ’cause we were too young to know, but we knew that we had been when we got older.”

“After emancipation we stayed at the Stone family for some time, ’cause they were good to us and we had no place to go.”  Mr. Quinn meant by emancipation that his master freed his slaves, and, as he said, “emancipated them a year before Lincoln did.”

Mr. Quinn said that his father was not freed when his mother and he and his brother were freed, because his father’s master “didn’t think the North would win the war.”  Stone’s slaves fared well and ate good food and “his own children didn’t treat us like we were slaves.”  He said some of the slaves on surrounding plantations and farms had it “awful hard and bad.”  Some times slaves would run away during the night, and he said that “we would give them something to eat.”  He said his mother did the cooking for the Stone family and that she was good to runaway slaves.

Submitted September 9, 1937
Indianapolis, Indiana

Federal Writers’ Project
of the W.P.A. 
District #6
Marion County
Harry Jackson

Ex slave story
Mrs. Candus Richardson
[HW:  Personal Interview]

Mrs. Candus Richardson, of 2710 Boulevard Place, was 18 years of age when the Civil War was over.  She was borned a slave on Jim Scott’s plantation on the “Homer Chitter river” in Franklin county, Mississippi.  Scott was the heir of “Old Jake Scott”.  “Old Jim Scott” had about fifty slaves, who raised crops, cotton, tobacco, and hogs.  Candus cooked for Scott and his wife, Miss Elizabeth.  They were both cruel, according to Mrs. Richardson.  She said that at one time her Master struck her over the head with the butt end of a cowhide, that made a hole in her head, the scar of which she still carries.  He struck her down because he caught her giving a hungry slave something to eat at the back door of the “big house”.  The “big house” was Scott’s house.