During a yellow fever epidemic before a quarantine could be declared a boatload of three hundred people left Louisville at night to go to Memphis, Tenn.  During the same time this boat went to New Orleans where yellow fever was raging.  The captain warned them of it.  In two narrow streets the old darkey recalled how he had seen the people fall over dead.  These streets were crowded and there were no sidewalks, only room for a wagon.  Here the victims would be sitting in the doorways, apparently asleep, only to fall over dead.

When the boat returned, one of the crew was stricken with this disease.  Uncle Billy nursed him until they reached his home at Cairo, Ill.  No one else took the yellow fever and this man recovered.

Another job “Uncle Billy” held was helping to make the brick used in the U.S.  Quarter Master Depot.  Colonel James Keigwin operated a brick kiln in what is now a colored settlement between 10th and 14th and Watt and Spring Sts.  The clay was obtained from this field.  It was his task to off-bare the brick after they were taken from the molds, and to place them in the eyes to be burned.  Wood was used as fuel.

“Uncle Billy” reads his Bible quite often.  He sometimes wonders why he is still left here—­all of his friends are gone; all his brothers and sisters are gone.  But this he believes is the solution—­that there must be someone left to tell about old times.

“The Bible,” he quotes, “says that two shall be working in the field together and one shall be taken and the other left.  I am the one who is left,” he concludes.

Henrietta Karwowski, Field Worker
Federal Writers’ Project
St. Joseph County—­District #1
South Bend, Indiana

Ex-slaves
Mr. And Mrs. Alex Smith
127 North Lake Street
South Bend, Indiana

Mr. and Mrs. Alex Smith, an eighty-three year old negro couple were slaves in Kentucky near Paris, Tennessee, as children.  They now reside at 127 North Lake Street, on the western limits of South Bend.  This couple lives in a little shack patched up with tar paper, tin, and wood.

Mrs. Elizabeth Smith, the talkative member or the family is a small woman, very wrinkled, with a stocking cap pulled over her gray hair.  She wore a dress made of three different print materials; sleeves of one kind, collar of another and body of a third.  Her front teeth were discolored, brown stubs, which suggested that she chews tobacco.

Mr. Alex Smith, the husband is tall, though probably he was a well built man at one time.  He gets around by means of a cane.  Mrs. Smith said that he is not at all well, and he was in the hospital for six weeks last winter.

The wife, Elizabeth or Betty, as her husband calls her, was a slave on the Peter Stubblefield plantation in Kentucky, the nearest town being Paris, Tennessee, while Mr. Smith was a slave on the Robert Stubblefield plantation nearby.