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626 Nelson Street, El Dorado, Arkansas
Age 80
"I was born in Union Pariah, Louisiana in the year of 1857, so the white folks told me, and I am eighty years old.
My mama died when I was two years old and my aunty raised me. She started me out washing dishes when I was
four years old and when I was six she was learning me how to cook. While the other hands was working in the field
I carried water. We had to cook out in the yard on an old skillet and lid, so you see I had to tote brush and bark and
roll up little logs such as I could to keep the fire from one time of cooking to the other. I was not but six years old
either. When I got to be seven years old I was cutting sprouts almost like a man and when I was eight I could pick
one hundred pounds of cotton. When it rained and we could not go to the field my aunty had me spinning thread to
make socks and cloth, then I had to card the bats and make the rolls to spin.
"My auntie was a slave and she lived in the edge of the field. of course I was born a slave but didn't know much
about it because my aunty did the bossing of me but I had a pretty hard time. Our wash tubs, water buckets, bread
trays and such were made out of tupelo gum logs dug out with some kind of an axe and when aunty would wash I
had to use the battling stick. I would carry the wet clothes to a stump and beat them with that battling stick and we
hung the clothes out on bushes and on the fence. We used water from a spring.
"In my young days all we wore was homespun and lowel. We lived in a log house with a dirt floor and the cracks
was chinked with mud and our bed was some poles nailed against the wall with two legs out on the dirt floor, and
we pulled grass and put in a lowel bed tick. My aunty would get old dresses, old coats, and old pants and make
quilts.
"I never went to school a day in my life. No, the back of my head has never rubbed against the walls of a
schoolhouse and I never did go to Sunday School and I never did like it. And I didn't go to church until I was grown
and the church that I did attend was called the Iron Jacket Church. Now they call it the Hard Shell Church. I believe
in foot washing. I don't go to church now because there is no Hard Shell church close around here."
Interviewer Miss Irene Robertson"
