…You want to know about slavery? Well, a great deal happened besides that, but …
…My Pappy wasn’t afraid of anything. He is light colored from the white blood, and he ran away several times. There are big woods all around and we saw lots of runaways. One old fellow named John has been a runaway for four years and the [slave] patterroller tries all their tricks, but they can’t catch him. They wanted him badly, because it inspired other slaves to run away if he stays a-loose… One day I was in the woods and met a … run-awayer [runaway enslaved person]. He came to the cabin and Mammy made him a bacon and egg sandwich and we never saw him again. Maybe he did get clear to Mexico, where a lot of the slaves ran to.
George Conrad was an enslaved person on a 900 acre farm in Kentucky. In this excerpt he begins by describing “patrollers” whose job was to be monitor the movement of enslaved peoples, to be sure if they were off their property they had the proper paperwork. He goes on to describe tales he’d heard of John Brown and the Underground Railroad.
I heard a lot of talk ’bout the patrollers. In those days if you went away from home and didn’t have a pass they’d whip you. Sometimes they’d whip you with a long black cow whip, and then sometimes they’d roast elm switches in the fire. This was called “cat-o-nine-tails”, and they’d whip you with that. We never had any jails; only punishment was just to whip you.
Now, the way the slaves travel. If a slave had been good sometimes old Master would let him ride his horse ; then, sometime they’d steal a horse out and ride them and slip him back before old Master ever found it out.
There was a man in those days by the name of John Brown. We called him an underground railroad man, ’cause he’d steal the slaves and carry them across the river in a boat. When you got on the other side you were free, ’cause you were in a free State, Ohio. We used to sing, and I guess young folks today do too: “John Brown’s Body Lies a’Molding In the Clay.” and “They Hung John Brown On a Sour Apple Tree.”
Interviewee Formerly enslaved person
Birth Year (Age)
Interviewer WPA Volunteer
Enslaver’s Name
George Conrad, Jr.
1860 (77)
Unknown
Joe Conrad
Interview Location
Residence State
Birth Location
Oklahoma City, OK
Oklahoma
Harrison County, Kentucky
Themes & Keywords
Additional Tags:
Underground Railroad, Emancipation
First person, slave patrols, John Brown, Underground Railroad
Rev. John R. Cox was born to two enslaved parents in Kentucky. In this excerpt, he tells a story of his mother’s escape from enslavement and how she lived in the wilderness for 2 years before being recaptured and sold. He then relates how this led her to his father, how they were married and had children together while enslaved, including Rev. Cox. He finishes up by telling about his education, and the punishment enslaved people sometimes got if they were caught trying to learn to read or write.
A slave owner, in West Virginia, bought a thirteen-year-old black girl at an auction. When this girl was taken to his home she escaped, and after searching everywhere, without finding her, he decided that she had been helped to escape and gave her up as lost. About two years after that a neighbor, on a close farm, was in the woods feeding his cattle, he saw what he first thought was a bear, running into the thicket from among his cows. Getting help, he rounded up the cattle and searching the thick woodland, finally found that what he had supposed was a wild animal, was the long lost fugitive black girl. She had lived all this time in caves, feeding on nuts, berries, wild apples, and milk from cows, that she could catch and milk. Returned to her master she was sold to a Mr. Morgan Whittaker who lived near where Prestonsburg, Kentucky now is.
Dr. David Cox, a physician from Scott County, Virginia, who treated Mr. Whitaker for cancer, saw this slave girl, who had become a strong healthy young woman, and Mr. Whitaker unable to otherwise pay his doctor bill, let Dr. Davis have her for the debt.
At this time the slave girl was about twenty-one years of age, and Dr. Davis took her home to Scott County, Virginia where he married her to his only other slave, George Cox, by the ceremony of laying a broom on the floor and having the two young negroes step over the broomstick.
Among the children of George Cox and his wife was Rev. John R. Cox, Col. who now lives in Catlettsburg, Kentucky, and is probably the only living ex-slave in this county.
After the Emancipation Proclamation, by President Lincoln, in 1865, John managed to get four years of schooling where he learned to read and write and become very proficient in arithmetic.
He says that had he had the opportunity to study that we have today he could have been the smartest man in the United States. He also says, that before freedom, the negroes in his neighborhood were allowed no books, if found looking at a book a slave was whipped unmercifully.
Interviewee Formerly enslaved person
Birth Year (Age)
Interviewer WPA Volunteer
Enslaver’s Name
Rev. John R. Cox
1852 (
Carl F. Hall
Dr. David Cox
Interview Location
Residence State
Birth Location
Cattletsburg, KY
Kentucky
Unknown
Themes & Keywords
Additional Tags:
Family, Education, Literacy
Third person, slave patrol, whipped, sold (family)
In this excerpt, the interviewer records George Thompson’s memories of enslavement in the first person. After describing how enslaved people were named, George Thompson explains how despite wanting to learn how to read, his enslaver used violence to prevent him from learning.
…I [George Thompson] was quite a small boy when our family, which included an older sister, was sold to Ed. Thompson in Metcalfe Co. Kentucky, who owned about 50 other slaves, and as was the custom then we were given the name of our new master, “Thompson”.
I was hardly twelve years old when slavery was abolished, yet I can remember at this late date most of the happenings as they existed at that time.
I was so young and inexperienced when freed I remained on the Thompson plantation for four years after the war and worked for my board [shelter] and clothes as coach boy and any other odd jobs around the plantation.
I have no education, I can neither read nor write, as a slave I was not allowed to have books. On Sundays, I would go into the woods and gather ginseng which I would sell to the doctors for from 10¢ to 15¢ a pound, and with this money, I would buy a book that was called the Blue Back Speller. Our master would not allow us to have any books and when we were lucky enough to own a book we would have to keep it hidden, for if our master would find us with a book he would whip us and take the book from us. After receiving three severe whippings I gave up and never again tried for any learning, and to this day I can neither read nor write…
Interviewee Formerly enslaved person
Birth Year (Age)
Interviewer WPA Volunteer
Enslaver’s Name
George Thompson
1854 (approx. 83)
William R. Mays
Manfred Furgeson, Ed Thompson
Interview Location
Residence State
Birth Location
Johnson County, IN
IN
Hart, KY
Themes & Keywords
Additional Tags:
Education, Literacy, Emancipation, Violence
Metcalf County, Hart County, Monroe County, First Person, Whipped, Sold, Slave Patrollers
Callie Williams was four years old when the Civil War ended. In this first person excerpt, the interviewer documents Callie Williams’ description of the life of enslaved people that was passed on to Callie Williams by her mother. In this excerpt, Callie Williams describes the role of song in the life of enslaved people.
…Most of the time the slaves would be too tired to do anything but go to bed at night, but sometimes they would sit around and sing after supper and they would sing and pray on Sunday. One of the songs that was used most was ’Yon Comes Old Master Jesus.’ If I remember, it went something like this:
‘I really believe Christ is coming again He’s coming in the morning He’s coming in the morning He’s coming with a rainbow on his shoulder He’s coming again by and by’
They tried to make them stop singing and praying during the [Civil] war because all they’d ask for was to be set free, but the slaves would get in the cabins and turn a big wash pot upside down and sing into that, and the noise couldn’t get out….
Interviewee Formerly enslaved person
Birth Year (Age)
Interviewer WPA Volunteer
Enslaver’s Name
Callie Williams
Approx. 1861 (Unknown)
Mary A. Poole
Hiram McLemore
Interview Location
Residence State
Birth Location
Mobile, AL
AL
Unknown
Themes & Keywords
Additional Tags:
Religion, Songs
Third Person, Dialect, Slave Patrollers, Hired Out
In this first person excerpt, the interviewer documents Callie Williams’ description of emancipation and enslaved people getting married. Since Callie Williams was only four years old when the Civil War ended, she explains that she is retelling stories told to her by her mother Vicey. Hiram McLemore, referred to as “Master” in the excerpt, enslaved over three hundred people, including Callie Williams and her parents, Vicey and Harry.
*Historically-used terms that are offensive, marginalizing and/or disparaging have been removed from the transcripts and replaced with [redacted]. See more information.
… I don’t remember anything about this except what Mammy [Vicey] said. When the Surrender [end of the Civil War] came, she said that a whole regiment of soldiers rode up to the house yelling to the [redacted] that they were free. Then the soldiers took the meat out of the smokehouse and got all the molasses and meal and gave it all to the [redacted]. They robbed the bees and then they’d eat dinner and go on to the next place, taking the menfolk with them, all except the ones too old, my pappy among them.
After it was all over my pappy rented land on Mr. McLemore’s place and he and mammy stayed there till they died. They were buried in the same graveyard that Mr. McLemore had set aside for his slaves.
I married Frank Williams in Montgomery, Alabama, but our marriage was nothing like mammy said her and pappy’s was. She said they ’jumped the broomstick.’ When any of the slaves wanted to get married they would go to the big house and tell Master and he’d get his broomstick and said, ’Harry, do you want Vicey?’ And Harry said ’Yes.’ Then Master said, ’Vicey, do you want Harry?’, and she said ’Yes.’ Then Master said, ’Join hands and jump the broomstick and you are married.’ The ceremony wasn’t much but they stuck lots closer then, and you didn’t hear about so many divorces and such as that.
Interviewee Formerly enslaved person
Birth Year (Age)
Interviewer WPA Volunteer
Enslaver’s Name
Callie Williams
Approx. 1861 (Unknown)
Mary A. Poole
Hiram McLemore
Interview Location
Residence State
Birth Location
Mobile, AL
AL
Unknown
Themes & Keywords
Additional Tags:
Family, Marriage, Emancipation, Civil War
Third Person, Dialect, Slave Patrollers, Hired Out
In this first person excerpt, the interviewer documents Callie Williams’ description of daily life for enslaved people. Hiram McLemore enslaved over 300 people, including Callie Wiliams and her family. Since Callie Williams was only four years old when the Civil War ended, she explains that she is retelling stories told to her by her mother Vicey, who she calls “Mammy” in this excerpt.
…My mammy said that they [enslaved people] waked up in the morning when they heard the sweep. That was a piece of iron hanging by a string and it made a loud noise when it was banged with another piece of iron. They had to get up at four o’clock and be at work by sun up. To do this, they almost all the time cooked breakfast the night before.
Pappy was a driver under the overseer, but Mammy said that she stayed at the little nursery cabin and looked after all the little babies. They had a cabin fixed up with homemade cradles and things where they put all the babies. Their mammies would come in from the field at about ten o’clock to nurse them and then later in the day, my mammy would feed the [other children]…
The slaves got rations every Monday night. There would be three pounds of meat and a peck of meal. There was a big garden that all of them worked and they had all the vegetables they needed and there was always plenty of skimmed milk. They cooked the meals on open fireplaces in the big iron ‘spiders’, big pots hanging over the fire from a hook. They’d do the cooking at night and then warm it over the next day if they wanted it that way.
While mammy was tending the babies she had to spin cotton and she was supposed to spin two ’cuts’ a day. Four ’cuts’ was a hard day’s work. What was a cut? You ought to know that! They had a reel and when it had spun three hundred yards it popped. That was a “cut.” When it had been spun, then another woman took it to the loom to make cloth for the slaves. They always took Saturday afternoon to clean up the clothes and cabins, because they always had to start work on Monday morning clean as a pin. If they didn’t, they got whipped for being dirty…
Most of the time the slaves would be too tired to do anything but go to bed at night, but sometimes they would sit around and sing after supper and they would sing and pray on Sunday…
Interviewee Formerly enslaved person
Birth Year (Age)
Interviewer WPA Volunteer
Enslaver’s Name
Callie Williams
Approx. 1861 (Unknown)
Mary A. Poole
Hiram McLemore
Interview Location
Residence State
Birth Location
Mobile, AL
AL
Unknown
Themes & Keywords
Additional Tags:
Economics, Child Care
Third Person, Dialect, Slave Patrollers, Hired Out
Anna Smith was married and had a young daughter when President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. This excerpt is the beginning of the interview. Here, the interviewer Geo. H. Conn offers his own personal assessment of Anna Smith. This excerpt offers teachers a chance to explore with students the context in which the WPA interviews occurred and how the interviewer influences the interview and its resulting narrative.
*Historically-used terms that are offensive, marginalizing and/or disparaging have been removed from the transcripts and replaced with [redacted]. See more information.
…In a little old rocking chair, sits an old [redacted] known to her friends as “Grandma” Smith, spending the remaining days with her grandchildren. Small of stature, tipping the scales at about 100 lbs. but alert to the wishes and cares of her children, this old lady keeps posted on current events from those around her. With no stoop or bent back and with a firm step she helps with the housework and preparing of meals, waiting, when permitted, on others. In odd moments, she like to work at her favorite task of “hooking” rag rugs. Never having worn glasses, her eyesight is the envy of the younger generation. She spends most of the time at home, preferring her rocker and pipe (she has been smoking for more than eighty year) to a back seat in an automobile.
When referring to Civil War days, her eyes flash and words flow from her with a fluency equal to that of any youngster. Much of her speech is hard to understand as she reverts to the early idiom and pronunciation of her race. Her head, tongue, arms and hands all move at the same time as she talks. A note of hesitancy about speaking of her past shows at times when she realizes she is talking to one not of her own race, but after eight years in the north, where she has been treated courteously by her white neighbors, that old feeling of inferiority under which she lived during slave days and later on a plantation in Kentucky has about disappeared.
Interviewee Formerly enslaved person
Birth Year (Age)
Interviewer WPA Volunteer
Enslaver’s Name
Anna Toll Smith
1835 (101 or 102)
Geo. H. Conn
Judge Toll
Interview Location
Residence State
Birth Location
Summit County, OH
OH
Henderson, KY
Themes & Keywords
Additional Tags:
Interviewer
Third Person, Veteran or Widow, Slave Patrollers, Henderson County
Unlike most of the interviews in this collection, the interviewer Martin Richardson was part of the Negro Writers’ Unit in Florida, a subgroup of the Federal Writers’ Project that employed Black workers.
Interviewer Martin Richardson’s introduction notes that he is recording, “Verbatim Interview with Arnold Gragston, 97-year-old ex-slave whose early life was spent helping slaves to freedom across the Ohio River, while he, himself, remained in bondage. As he puts it, he guesses he could be called a ‘conductor’ on the underground railway.” In this first person excerpt, Martin Richardson recounts Arnold Gragston’s account of how he became a conductor on the Underground Railroad.
…Most of the slaves didn’t know when they was born, but I did. You see, I was born on a Christmas morning–it was in 1840; I was a full grown man when I finally got my freedom.
Before I got it, though, I helped a lot of others get theirs. Lord only knows how many; might have been as much as two-three hundred. It was way more than a hundred, I know…
It was because he [Mr. Tabb, the man who enslaved Arnold Gragston] used to let me go around in the day and night so much that I came to be the one who carried the running away slaves over the river. It was funny the way I started it too.
I didn’t have no idea of ever getting mixed up in any sort of business like that until one special night. I hadn’t even thought of rowing across the river myself.
But one night I had gone on another plantation courting, and the old woman whose house I went to told me she had a real pretty girl there who wanted to go across the river and would I take her? I was scared and
backed out in a hurry. But then I saw the girl, and she was such a pretty little thing, brown-skinned and kinda rosy, and looking as scared as I was feeling, so it wasn’t long before I was listening to the old woman tell me when to take her and where to leave her on the other side.
I didn’t have nerve enough to do it that night, though, and I told them to wait for me until tomorrow night. All the next day I kept seeing Mister Tabb laying a rawhide across my back, or shooting me, and kept seeing that scared little brown girl back at the house, looking at me with her big eyes and asking me if I wouldn’t just row her across to Ripley. Me and Mr. Tabb lost, and soon as dust settled that night, I was at the old lady’s house.
I don’t know how I ever rowed the boat across the river the current was strong and I was trembling. I couldn’t see a thing there in the dark, but I felt that girl’s eyes. We didn’t dare to whisper, so I couldn’t tell her how sure I was that Mr. Tabb or some of the others owners would tear me up when they found out what I had done. I just knew they would find out.
I was worried, too, about where to put her out of the boat. I couldn’t ride her across the river all night, and I didn’t know a thing about the other side. I had heard a lot about it from other slaves but I thought it was just about like Mason County, with slaves and masters, overseers and rawhides; and so, I just knew that if I pulled the boat up and went to asking people where to take her I would get a beating or get killed.
I don’t know whether it seemed like a long time or a short time, now–it’s so long ago; I know it was a long time rowing there in the cold and worrying. But it was short, too, ’cause as soon as I did get on the other side the big-eyed, brown-skin girl would be gone. Well, pretty soon I saw a tall light and I remembered what the old lady had told me about looking for that light and rowing to it. I did; and when I got up to it, two men reached down and grabbed her; I started trembling all over again, and praying. Then, one of the men took my arm and I just felt down inside of me that the Lord had got ready for me. ‘You hungry, Boy?’ is what he asked me, and if he hadn’t been holding me I think I would have fallen backward into the river.
That was my first trip; it took me a long time to get over my scared feeling, but I finally did, and I soon found myself going back across the river, with two and three people, and sometimes a whole boatload. I got so I used to make three and four trips a month…
Interviewee Formerly enslaved person
Birth Year (Age)
Interviewer WPA Volunteer
Enslaver’s Name
Arnold Gragston
1840 (97)
Martin Richardson
Jack Tabb
Interview Location
Residence State
Birth Location
Eddy, FL
FL
KY
Themes & Keywords
Additional Tags:
Underground Railroad, Conductor of Underground Railroad, Escape, Resistance
First Person, Dialect, Whipped, Slave Patrollers, Notable, Mason County
Unlike most of the interviews in this collection, the interviewer Martin Richardson was part of the Negro Writers’ Unit in Florida, a subgroup of the Federal Writers’ Project that employed Black workers.
Interviewer Martin Richardson’s introduction notes that he is recording, “Verbatim Interview with Arnold Gragston, 97-year-old ex-slave whose early life was spent helping slaves to freedom across the Ohio River, while he, himself, remained in bondage. As he puts it, he guesses he could be called a ‘conductor’ on the underground railway.” Arnold Gragston estimated that he rowed two or three hundred enslaved people to freedom. In this excerpt, Arnold Gragston describes how his enslaver treated enslaved people, describing education and marriage practices.
…Mr. Tabb [Arnold Gragston’s enslaver] was a pretty good man. He used to beat us, sure; but not nearly so much as others did, some of his own kin people, even. But he was kinda funny sometimes; he used to have a special slave who didn’t have nothing to do but teach the rest of us–we had about ten on the plantation, and a lot on the other plantations near us–how to read and write and figure. Mr. Tabb liked us to know how to figure. But sometimes when he would send for us and we would be a long time coming, he would ask us where we had been. If we told him we had been learning to read, he would near beat the daylights out of us–after getting somebody to teach us; I think he did some of that so that the other owners wouldn’t say he was spoiling his slaves.
He was funny about us marrying, too. He would let us go a-courting on the other plantations near anytime we liked, if we were good, and if we found somebody we wanted to marry, and she was on a plantation that
belonged to one of his kin folks or a friend, he would swap a slave so that the husband and wife could be together. Sometimes, when he couldn’t do this, he would let a slave work all day on his plantation, and live with his wife at night on her plantation. Some of the other owners was always talking about his spoiling us…
Interviewee Formerly enslaved person
Birth Year (Age)
Interviewer WPA Volunteer
Enslaver’s Name
Arnold Gragston
1840 (97)
Martin Richardson
Jack Tabb
Interview Location
Residence State
Birth Location
Eddy, FL
FL
KY
Themes & Keywords
Additional Tags:
Underground Railroad, Conductor of Underground Railroad, Education, Marriage, Family, Violence
First Person, Dialect, Whipped, Slave Patrollers, Notable, Mason County