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"Aunt Adeline," an ex-slave of Wilkes County, Georgia, thinks she is "around a hundred." Her first memory is, in her own words, "my love for my nother. I loved her so! I would cry when I couldn't be with her. When I growed up, I kep' on loving her jes' that-a-way, even after I married and had children of my own."
Adeline's mother worked in the field, drove steers, and was considered the best meat cutter on the plantation. The slave women were required to spin, and Adeline's mother was unusually good at spinning wool, "and that kind of spinning was powerful slow," added the old woman. "My mother was one of the best dyers anywhere around. I was too. I made colors by mixing up all kinds of bark and leaves. I made the prettiest sort of lilac color with maple bark and pine bark- not the outside pine bark, but that little thin akin that grows right down next to the tree." Adeline remembers one dress she loved: "I never will forget it as long as I live. It was a hickory stripe dress they made for me, with brass buttons at the wrist bands. I was so proud of that dress and felt so dressed up in it, I just strutted!"
She remembers the plantation store and the candy the master gave the Negro children. "Bright, pretty sticks of sandy!" Tin sups hold a special niche in her memory. But there were punishments, too. "Good or bad, we got whippings with a long cowhide kept just for that. They whipped us to make us grow better, I reckon!"
Asked about doctors, Adeline replied:
"I was born, growed up, married and had sixteen children and never had no doctor till here since I got so old!"
Plantation ingenuity was shown in home concoctions and tonics. At the first sniffle of a cold, the slaves were called in and given a drink of fat lightwood tea, made by pouring boiling water over split kindling. "Cause lightwood got turpentine in it," explained Adeline. She said that a springtime tonic was made of anvil dust, gathered at the blacksmith's shop, mixed with syrup. This was occasionally varied with a concoction of garlic and whiskey!
Adeline adheres to traditional Negro beliefs, and concluded her recountal of folklore with the dark prediction: "Every gloomy day brings death. Somebody leaving this unfriendly world to-day!""
