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A. Anna Bowles Wiley
Aunt Patsy Jane Bland will be 107 years of age on August 8, 1937. Long before the Civil War was thought of "a little black child" was born in a cabin on the plantation of William Kettering in Shelby County, Kentucky.
She was one of a large family, none of whom were destined, however, to live to her age. Aunt Patsy Jane was sold twice after that, to Charles Morgan, and to John Boyle.
She was the mother of four when the Civil War began with the shot fired on Fort Sumter, and when the war was over, the slaves freed, Aunt Patsy took her four children, right smart size then, into freedom.
Aunt Patsy remembers her plantation life well. Her mental faculties are in excellent condition, and while she will tell you that her mind don't work in a straight line, she can tell of those long past days in an interesting way, that carried one back through historical facts to days of slavery, when the owner looked after his black men and women because they were his property if for no other reason.
Gazing backward, Aunt Patsy recalled that she "was a reggler limb" when she was a child, that there was nuthin' she did not do to have fun, and many was the lickin' she got for it.
She had to work, too, for life was not all play and she recalls sitting at the feet of her little miss, and learning to spell out her letters, until the mother of the white child decided that she was getting too smart and she had to stop, until she was married to her last and fourth husband, who taught her some more. Aunt Patsy could read for a long time by spelling it out, but recently her eyes "aint so good."
Aunt Patsy lives at 1519 North Twenty-seventh street now, with her next to the youngest son, Johnny Wilson, who is a man up in years. She cooks for the two of them and her little home is clean and orderly. "I aint seen a well day fo' three years," she told the reporter, and when asked how she got around, she said she did pretty well with her wooden leg, (which was an old hickory cane that supported her well, as she made her way about, to cook or mend).
Aunt Patsy remembers the day all the colored folks on her plantation were freed. There was crying, there was shouting, there was joy and sadness, many not wishing to leave and go out into the world of which they knew nothing. She gathered her four children around her and with her husband, Mr. Wilson, left the plantation. When asked if she was happier free, Aunt Patsy Jane looked off into the distance and said: "Free, is anybody ever free? Aint everybody you know a slave to some one or something or other?" Showing that logic still lives within this remarkable woman, who was transplanted to Terre Haute in 1919, because some of her folks were up here.
She has a small pension from her husband, Mr. Bland, who was a soldier in the Civil War, that assists in her keeping.
She has worked always, and would know no other way. She has carded and spun, helped raise tobacco, two crops, some years when she would cut the leaves to the old stalk and let another crop grow.
At the south of her home is a patch of tobacco right now, being raised by her son and herself, but Aunt Patsy says she is too delicate to smoke that old Tennessee Red now. She smokes sack tobacco in her old corncob pipe - just cannot do without it and it helps so much to dream over past days when Aunt Patsy was young, tall and hardy as a young pine tree, when she ate sweet 'taters and possum with the rest, sang jubilee songs and even made up songs down in Kaintuck, on the old plantation.
She remembers sleeping on a straw pallet on the floor, then one time on a trundle bed which shoved back under the big bed when filled with small dark faces; she remembers baking corn dodger on a hot brick fireplace, of hanging the kettle over the crane to cook "Pawn hoss," made from meal and bacon; of roastin' sweet taters and sweet cawn, and baking ash cake in the hot ashes; of seeing a wedding of white folks on the place in the big house.
The wedding preparations began days in advance with the saving of chickens and eggs and butter. The liveliest egg-beating, butter creaming, raisin stoning, sugar pounding, cake icing, cocoanut scraping and grating, jelly straining, silver cleaning, egg frothing, floor rubbing, pastry making, ruffle crimping, tarlatan smoothing, trunk moving time you ever saw, and the peeping at the bride with her long veil and train, and the guests the whole army of slaves turned out to help.
Aunt Patsy remembers the night before the wedding when they all gathered in the quarter to sing every song they knew over and over again, celebrating the leaving of the bride for Virginia and how Young Miss died soon after her big wedding and was buried in her bridal dress.
She recalls deaths of some of the white folks, of the burying of her negro friends. She ran away one time to see where that roar like a storm came from that they heard, and she found it was a water fall over a dam, seven miles away and got a good "hiding" when she got back. She recalls her oldest daughter, who now lives in Dayton, Ohio, and "looks as old as her maw" who used to whoop it up "Hurray fer Jepp Davey."
Aunt Patsy has done every sort of work even to ploughing, "I worked like a man, I've spun flax, cut wool off sheep, washed it, carded and spun it for stockings and underwear, I never wore anything but wool underwear in the winter time and none of my younguns did either.
"I used to sit and knit wool up for their stockings. Indeed I have worked hard," states Aunt Patsy, who recalls that her clothes were also made of tow linen.
She had seven children in all and they are gone --- gone like those visions she sits and sees over her old cob pipe.
Mrs. Bland is a woman to whom there are thousands of women who might lift their hats in tribute. She has indeed earned her passage through this Ocean of Life and a freedom of peace, superceding any freedom of the past. She is a Baptist by religion, and when she can get going, she attends the church nearest to her home.
And, can she shout, when she gets to the meeting house! She certainly can. Her religion is deep, she says.
She will celebrate her birthday at her home on August 8, and she does hope that everyone whom she knows will send her a birthday present. It is not everyone who can reach the age of 107 and have their picture taken, too. No sirree.
And there are few women, who can count back to many years before the War of the Rebellion, and remember seeing the soldiers from whom they ran like a rat, and hid out "because they were skeered." But Aunt Patsy Jane Bland has much to think of, and so she sits in her old arm chair, looking out of her door, remembering - and remember - and it is indeed a long way back.
Bolden, Lizzie As told by Mrs. William D. Perry Jefferson County, Indiana (Grace Monroe)
