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Place of Birth: On Mitchem plantation, Muscogee County, near Columbus, Georgia Date of Birth: About 1855 Present Residence: 1654 - 4th Avenue, Columbus, Georgia By: J. R. Jones (8-28-36)
Subject is of mixed Indian, Caucasian and Negro blood. She was born in bondage, the property of Jesse Mitchem, a Muscogee County planter. Her father was owned by Col. Henry Marrison, also of Muscogee County. About 1860, the Colonel sold her father to Mr. Mitchem in order that her parents could live together.
"Aunt Georgia" spent most of her life of a plantation near Elleralle, Georgia.
As long as her people's former owners, or any of their descendants lived in Muscogee County, "Aunt Georgia" remained near them. When death overtakes her, she hopes to join her "good white folks" in the other and better world.
Among "Aunt Gerogia Anne's" earliest and most pleasant recollections are those of the grand social and church affairs of the "big" white folks, in the days when the ladies wore hoop-skirts, "whooch kivered evy thing en' totched nothin', and the young white blades wore mustaches and beards. There wuzn't no kissing an' huggin' in dem days", said she. When a courtship developed, it was a serious affair; "an' as fer table manners, why a white man wud as leave set down to dinner 'thout havin' his breaches on as to leave off his coat!"
The preacher preached about hell-fire and brim-stone during "Aunt Georgia Anne's girlhood and, for fifty year artards". But now they have put on the soft pedal and she doan' know whut' to think about this change in their technique.
Nothing, in all her life of eighty-four years, has impressed this old ex-slave as the changes in the dress, mannerisms and morals of the people of both races. She doesn't appear to wonder any at the automobile, the radio, the airplane or the marvels of electricity, but she cannot become reconciled to present day folk customs, slang and sundry isms.
Reflecting the sentiments of the majority of her race, she is opposed to capital punishment. She believes implicitly in divine punishment for all major transgressions of the criminal code. As people sow so shall they reap, and it is not given to man to judge in her theory. Slavery was both wrong and right: wrong in that it deprived black humanity of the fruits of it's own labor: right, in that it undertook to improve the negro morally - practically expresses her views on that subject.
