SLAVE NARRATIVES - Library of Congress

W I don f t know how my father and my mother met up* They lijed 6n the
same plantation and in the same house* They were owned by the same man
when freedom came* I don't know how they got together* I have often
wondered about that* One from Tennessee and the other from Horth Carolina,
but they got together* I guess that they must have been born in different
places and brought together through being bought and sold*
w My mother was a Murrill* My father was a Cartwright* My father's
brother Lewis was a man who didn't take nothing much from anybody, and he
'specially didn't like to take a whipping* When Lewis* master wanted to
whip him, he would call his mother—the master's mother—and have her whip
him because he figured Uncle Lewis wouldn't hit a woman*
"I have six children altogether* Two of them are dead* There are
three girls and one boy living* The oldest is fifty-seven\ the next*
fifty; and the youngest, forty-eight* The youngest is in the hospital for
nervous and mental diseases* She has been there ever since 1927* The
oldest had an arm and four ribs broken in an auto accident last January on
the sixteenth of the month* She didn't get a penny to pay for her trouble*
I remember the man did give her fifteen cents once* The track struck her
at the alley there and knocked her clean across the street* She is fifty-
seven years old and bones don f t knit fast on people that old* She ain f t
able to do no work yet* All of my daughters are out of work* I don f t know
where the hoy is* He is somewheres up North*
Slave Houses
"I have seen some old log houses that they said the slaves used to
live in* I was too young to notice before freedom* I have seen different
specimens of houses that they lived in* One log house had a plank house
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