Plenty to Eat

“My father would kill a hog and keep the meat in a pit under the house.  I know what it is now.  I didn’t know then.  He would clean the hog and everything before he would bring him to the house.  You had to come down outside the house and go into the pit when you wanted to get meat to eat.  If my father didn’t have a hog, he would steal one from his master’s pen and cut its throat and bring it to the pit.

“My folks liked hog guts.  We didn’t try to keep them long.  We’d jus’ clean ’em and scrape ’em and throw ’em in the pot.  I didn’t like to clean ’em but I sure loved to eat ’em.  Father had a great big pot they called the wash pot and we would cook the chit’lins in it.  You could smell ’em all over the country.  I didn’t have no sense.  Whenever we had a big hog killin’, I would say to the other kids, ’We got plenty of meat at our house.’

“They would say back, ‘Where you got it?’

“I would tell ’em.  And they would say, ‘Give us some.’

“And I would say to them, ‘No, that’s for us.’

“So they called us ‘big niggers.’

Marriages Since Freedom

“My first baby was born to my husband.  I didn’t throw myself away.  I married Mr. Cragin in 1867.  He lived with me about fifteen years before he died.  He got kicked.  He was a baker.  During the War, he was the cook in a camp.  He went to get some flour one morning.  He snatched the tray too hard and it kicked him in his bowels.  He never did get over it.  The tray was full of flour and it was big and heavy.  It was a sliding tray.  It rolled out easy and fast and you had to pull it careful.  I don’t know why they called it a kick.

“I married a second husband—­if you can call it that—­a nigger named Jones.  He had a spoonful of sense.  We didn’t live together three months.  He came in one day and I didn’t have dinner ready.  He slapped me.  I had never been slapped by a man before.  I went to the drawer and got my pistol out and started to kill him.  But I didn’t.  I told him to leave there fast.  He had promised to do a lot of things and didn’t do them, and then he used to use bad language too.

Occupation

“I’ve always sewed for a living.  See that sign up there?” The sign read: 

  All kinds of buttons sewed on
          mending too

“I can’t cut out no dress and make it, but I can use a needle on patching and quilting.  Can’t nobody beat me doin’ that.  I can knit, too.  I can make stockings, gloves, and all such things.

“I belong to Bib Bethel Church, and I get most of my support from the Lord.  I get help from the government.  I’m trying to get moved, and I’m just sittin’ here waiting for the man to come and move me.  I ain’t got no money, but he promised to move me.”