“When my old master’s property was divided, I don’t know why—­he wasn’t dead nor nothin’—­I fell to Miss Evelyn, but I stayed in Nashville working for Miss Jennie Nelson, one of Harmon’s daughters.  Miss Jennie was my young mistress.  My brothers were already free.  I don’t know how Miss Polly came to tell me I was free.  But my brothers would see me and tell me to run away and come on home and they would protect me, but I was afraid to try it.  Finally Miss Polly found that she couldn’t keep me any longer and she come and told me I was free.  But I thought that she was fooling me and just wanted to sell me to the speculators.

Family

“My mother was the mother of twenty children and I am the mother of eighteen.  My youngest is forty-five.  I don’t know whether any of my mother’s children is living now or not.  I left them that didn’t join the militia in Hempstead County fifty-seven years ago.  Them that joined the militia went off.  I don’t know nothin’ about them.  I have two girls living that I know about.  I had two boys went to France and I never heard nothin’ ’bout what happened to them.  Nothing—­not a word.  Red Cross has hunted ’em.  Police Mitchell hunted ’em—­police Mitchell in Little Rock.  But I ain’t heard nothin’ ’bout ’em.

Work

“The first work I did was nursing and after that I was water toter.  I reckon I was about seven or eight years old when I first began to nurse.  I could barely lift the baby.  I would have to drag them ’round.  Then I toted water to the field.  Then when I was put to plowing, and chopping cotton, I don’t know exactly how old I was.  But I know I was a young girl and it was a good while before the War.  I had to do anything that come up—­thrashing wheat, sawing logs, with a wristband on, lifting logs, splitting rails.  Women in them days wasn’t tender like they is now.  They would call on you to work like men and you better work too.  My mother and father were both field hands.

Soldiers

“Oo-oo-oo-ee-ee-ee!!  Man, the soldiers would pass our house at daylight, two deep or four deep, and be passing it at sundown still marching making it to the next stockade.  Those were Yankees.  They didn’t set no slaves free.  When I knowed anything about freedom, it was the Bureaus.  We didn’t know nothing like young folks do now.

“We hardly knowed our names.  We was cussed for so many bitches and sons of bitches and bloody bitches, and blood of bitches.  We never heard our names scarcely at all.  First young man I went with wanted to know my initials!  What did I know ’bout initials?  You ask ’em ten years old now, and they’ll tell you.  That was after the War.  Initials!!!

Slave Sales

“Have I seen slaves sold!  Good God, man!  I have seed them sold in droves.  I have worn a buck and gag in my mouth for three days for trying to run away.  I couldn’t eat nor drink—­couldn’t even catch the slobber that fell from my mouth and run down my chest till the flies settled on it and blowed it.  ‘Scuse me but jus’ look at these places. (She pulled open her waist and showed scars where the maggots had eaten in—­ed.)