SLAVE NARRATIVES - Library of Congress

and make us split rails and clear up land for it# It was a cinch if he
didn't give it to you you couldn't get nothin'* Wasn't no way to get
nothing* Then when crop time rolled 'round again they would take it all
out of your crops* Make you split rails and wood to earn your meat and
then charge it up to your crop anyhow* But you couldn't do nothin' 'bout
it.
"Sometimes a barrel of molasses would set up in the smokehouse and
turn to sugar* You goin' hungry and molasses wastin'* They was determined
not to give you too much of it*
"I made my way by farming* After I got to be some size, I started at
it* I farmed all my life* While I could work, things was pretty good*
Wisht I was on a farm now* Even when I'm 'round here sick, I can git these
potatoes raised with a little help from the neighbors*
*I don't belong to church* I oughter, but I don't* !Ehen again, I
figure that a man can be just as good out of it as he can in it* I've got
good desires, but I never confessed to the public*
"I have had three hundred dollars worth of stuff stolen from me*
Everything I produced is stolen from me because I have no way to protect
myself* What I raise if I don't get shet of it right away, the people get
shet of it for me* I had eighty head of chickens in the barn out there
runnin' 'round* When I got sick and was in the bed and couldn't help my-
self, the chickens went* In the daytime, they would fix traps and jerk a
string and pull a board down on them and then go out in the weeds and get
them* I never reported nothin' to the police. I wasn't able to report
nothing* I was just batching, and now and then people would come in and
report them to me. They would wait till they saw somebody come in
and when they saw that I was talking and wouldn't notice them,
5*
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