SLAVE NARRATIVES - Library of Congress

You never saw how much cotton was ginned, nor how much he got for it, nor
how much it was worth nor nothing* They would just tell you you wasn't due
nothing* They did that to hold you far another year* You got nothing to
move on so you stay there and take what he gives you*
*0f all the crying you ever heard, one morning we f d got up and the
pigs and hogs in the lot that we had fattened to go on that winter, he was
catching them* After we f d done fattened them with the corn that was our
share, he took f em and sold f em* We didn't even know we owed him anything*
We thought the crops had done settled things* Nobody told us nothin'* All
we children cried * The old man and the old woman didn f t say nothing,
because they was scared* My mother would get up and go down and milk the
cows and what she f d get for the milking would maybe be a bucket of butter-
milk*
"We'd have a spoonful of black molasses and corn bread and buttermilk
for breakfast* We got flour bread once a week* We would work hard all the
week talkin 1 f bout what good biscuits we f d have Sunday morning* Sack of
flour would last two or three months because we wouldn't cook flour bread
only once a week—-Saturday night or Sunday morning* /
"We had no skillet at that time* We would rake the fireplace and push
the ashes back and then you would put the cake down on the hearth or on a
piece of paper or a leaf and then pull the ashes over the cake to cook it*
Just like you roast a sweet potato* Then when it got done, you would rake
the ashes back and wash the cake and you would eat it* Sometimes you would
strike a little grit or gravel in it and break your teeth* But then I f m
tellin f you the truth about it*
"When our hogs was taken that time* we didn f t have nothing to go on that
winter* They would compel us to stay* They would allowance us some meat
4*
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