“It wasn’t so long after the surrender before schools for Negroes were opened.  It looked like they went wild trying to do just like their white folks had done.  As for buying homes, I don’t know where they would have gotten the money to pay for homes and land.

“At the time I married I was a washerwoman for the white folks.  My first husband was Isaac Dixon, who came from some place in Alabama and had been owned by Dr. Lipscomb, the chancelor of the university.  Dr. Lipscomb married us in the colored Methodist Church, and that night the church was crowded to overflowing.  I wore a white dress made with a long train; that was the style then.  After the ceremony, my mother served cake and wine at her house.  Our six children were prettier than you, but only three of them lived to get grown.  Our white friends named our children.  My first husband died and then I married Jones Colbert, who belonged to Marse Fletcher Colbert of Madison County.  We just went around to the preacher’s house and got married.  Jones was an old man when I married him.  He was a preacher.  He is dead now and so are all my children except one.  I have one grandson, and this is the shameful part about him; his mother won’t married when he was born, but of course she married later.

“Now I am going to tell you the truth as I see it.  Abraham Lincoln was an instrument of God sent to set us free, for it was God’s will that we should be freed.  I never did hitch my mind on Jeff Davis; like the children of Israel, he had his time to rule.  Booker T. Washington!  Well, now I didn’t give him a thought.  He had to do his part.  His mistress had taught him to read.

“Why did I join the church?  Well, when the white folks sent their help off to Mississippi trying to keep them slaves, my sister and I went with Miss Rosa Crawford to Jackson.  Before I left home my mother gave me an alabaster doll and told me to be a good girl and pray every night.  Well, I never saw so many slave-houses in my life as I saw in Mississippi.  Every night when I heard a colored man named Ben praying in his room that made me think of what my mother had told me and I grew more and more homesick for her.  Finally one night I crept into Uncle Ben’s room and asked him to tell me about God, and he did.  After that, every night I went into his room and we prayed together.  Yes, Honey, I found God in Jackson, Mississippi, and I joined the church just as soon as I could after I got back to my mother and dear old Athens.

“Yes, Honey, I was raised and loved by my own white folks and, when I grew to be old enough and large enough, I worked for them.  I have been with, or worked for, white folks all my life and, just let me tell you, I had the best white folks in the world, but it was by God’s plan that the Negroes were set free.”

[HW:  Dist. 1 Ex.  Slave #21 (with Photograph)]

[HW:  “John Cole”]

Subject:  A slave remembers
District:  No. 1 W.P.A
Editor:  Edward Ficklen
Supervisor:  Joseph E. Jaffee
[may 8 1937]