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Just a few recollections of life in slavery time, as told me by my mother, who was Eliza, Taliaferro Williamson, daughter of Dickerson and Polly Taliaferro. My mother was borth at Mt. Airy, North Carolina, near the Virginia line, and always went to school, across the line, in Virginia. Her grandfather was John Taliaffero, slave holder, tobacee raiser, and farmer. The negro quarters were near the "Big House". Nother said that great-grandfather would go to the back door each night and call every slave to come in for family prayer. They came and knelt in the "Big House." while he prayed. Mother said it was like a camp-meeting when he died - wailing and weeping by the negroes for their old Marster. She said the slaves had the same food that the white family had and the same warm clothes for winter. All clothing, bed sheets, table linen, towels, etc, were hand woven. They raised sheep for wool, and flax for linen, but I don't know where they got the cotton they used. The work of the house and farm was divided as with a big family. Some of the woman cooked, sewed, wove, washed, milked, but were never sent to the field. None of the Toliver family believed in woman working in the field. When each of great-grandfather's children married, he or she was given a few slaves. I think he gave my grandfather. Dickerson Taliaferre, three slaves, and these he broaght with him to Georgia when they settled in whitfield County. My grandfather was a member of the legislature from whitfield County for two terms. He was as gentle with his slaves as a father would have been, and was never known to abuse one of them. One of his slaves, wh was a small boy at the close of the war, stayed with my grandfather until he was a grown man, them after a few years away from home, came home to old Marster to die. This is the picture of good slave solders, but sad to think, that all were not of that type. The following picture of horror, which was also told me by my mother. was like a nightmare to my childin mind.
Two families living on farms adjacent to her fathers. They were the two Tucker brothers, tobaces raisers One of the wives. Polly, or Pol, as she was called, hated the family of her husband's brother because they were more affluent than she liked them to be. Her ?? ceased the two families to live in disagreement. Little joe belonged to Pol's family, and was somewhere between ten and fourteen years old. Mother said Pol made Joe work in the field at night, and forced him to sing so they would know he wasn't asleep. He wore nothing in summer but an old shirt which came below his knees. The only food Pol would give him was scraps from the table - handed to him out the back door. Mother said Roe had some kind of impediment in her speech, which caused her to say 'ah' at the close or a sentence. So, when she called Joe to the back door to give him his mess of scraps, she would say, "Here, Joe, here's your truck, ah." Mother was a little girl then, and she and grandmother felt so sorry for Joe that they would bake baskets of sweet potatoes and slip them into the field to him. She said he would come through the corn almost crawling, so Pol wouldn't see him, take the sweet potatoes in the tail of his shirt and scuttle sack stuff where he might hide and eat them.
She had a negro woman who had a baby (and there may have been other women) but this negro woman was not allowed to see her baby except just as a cow would be let in to her calf at certain times during the day. After which she had to go to the field and leave it alone. Mother said that Pol sither threw or kicked the baby into the yard because it cried, and it died. I don't know why the authorities didn't arrest her, but she may have had an alibi, or some excase for the death of the child.
The other Tacker brother had made a fine crop of tobacco that year, more than a thousand dollars worth in his big bars. Pol made one of her slaves go with her, and she set fire to the tobacco barn of her brother-in-law farm before the flames drew a crowd, she hid in the grass, near the path when the people were running to the fire. She had some kind of stroke, perhaps from fright, or pare devil which 'put her out of business I wish I could remember whether it killed her or just made a paralytie of her, this is a true story.
