The slave pronunciation of “m(o)ster” is more nearly correct than the normal pronunciation of “m(a)ster.”  Frequent pronunciations are marse, marsa, m(o)ssa, m(o)stuh, and m(a)ssa.

Interviewer:  Samuel S. Taylor
Person interviewed:  Silas Dothrum
                    1419 Pulaski Street, Little Rock, Arkansas
Age:  82 or 83
Occupation:  Field hand, general work
[May 31 1939]

[HW:  Don’t Know Nothin’]

“The white people that owned me are all dead.  I am in this world by myself.  Do you know anything that a man can put on his leg to keep the flies off it when it has sores on it?  I had the city doctor here, but he didn’t do me no good.  I have to tie these rags around my foot to keep the flies off the sores.

“I worked with a white man nineteen years—­put all that concrete down out there.  He is still living.  He helps me a little sometimes.  If it weren’t for him I couldn’t live.  The government allows me and my wife together eight dollars a month.  I asked for more, but I couldn’t get it.  I get commodities too.  They amount to about a dollar and a half a month.  They don’t give any flour or meat.  Last month they gave some eggs and those were nice.  What they give is a help to a man in my condition.

“I don’t know where I was born and I don’t know when.  I know I am eighty-two or eighty-three years old.  The white folks that raised me told me how old I was.  I never saw my father and my mother in my life.  I don’t know nothin’.  I’m Just on old green man.  I don’t know none of my kin people—­father, mother, uncles, cousins, nothin’.  When I found myself the white people had me.

“That was right down here in Arkansas here on old Dick Fletcher’s farm.  There was a big family of them Fletchers.  They took me to Harriet Lindsay to raise.  She is dead.  She had a husband and he is dead.  She had two or three daughters and they are dead.

Slave Houses

“I can remember what they used to live in.  The slaves lived in old wooden houses.  They ain’t living in no houses now—­one-half of them.  They were log houses—­two rooms.  I have forgot what kind of floors—­dirt, I guess.  Food was kept in a smokehouse.

Relatives

“The whole family of Fletchers is dead.  I think that there is a Jef Fletcher living in this town.  I don’t know just where but I met him sometime ago.  He doesn’t do nothing for me.  Nobody gives me anything for myself but the man I used to work for—­the concrete man.  He’s a man.

How Freedom Came

“All I remember is that they boxed us all up in covered wagons and carried us to Texas and kept us there till freedom came.  Then they told us we were free and could go where wanted.  But they kept me in bondage and a girl that used to be with them.  We were bound to them that we would have to stay with them.  They kept me just the same as under bondage.  I wasn’t allowed no kind of say-so.