SLAVE NARRATIVES - Library of Congress

"My mother and father didn f t know their age* The «hite folks kept the
ages, and that was something they didn 9 t allow the slaves to handle* I must
have been four or five years old when my mother was in the fieldf because I
wasn f t allowed to take the baby out of the cradle but just to sit and rock it*
Arkansas
"When I come to Arkansas, stages was running from Little Bock down
toward Pine Bluff. Jesse James robbed the Pine Bluff train* That about
the first train came in* They cut down the trees across the train track*
They had a wooden gun and they went in there and robbed that train with it*
They sent him to the pen and he learned a trade making cigars*
n The Union Station was just like that hillside* It was just one street
in the town* I don f t know what year nor nothing about it because when I
came here it was just like somebody didn f t have any sense*
Plantation
"The slave quarter was a row of houses* The plantation was high land*
The houses were little log houses with one room* They had fire arches*
They would hang pots over the fire* They would have spiders that you call
ovens* You would put coals on top of the spider and you would put them
under it and you could smell that stuff cooking! The door was in the top of
the spider and the coeds would be on top of the door*
"You couldn f t cook no thin* then without somebody knowin f it* Couldn't
cook and eat in the back while folk sit in the front without them knowin 1
it* They used to steal from the old master and cook it and they would
be burning rags or something to keep the white folks from smelling it*
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