Document 10.9 Mary Reynolds, Recalling Work, Punishment, and Faith c. 1850s

Document 10.9

Mary Reynolds | Recalling Work, Punishment, and Faith c. 1850s

Ex-slaves interviewed in the 1930s offered a wealth of information. Mary Reynolds claimed to be more than a hundred years old when interviewed in 1937, but her memories were vivid. She was one of the older interviewees and thus had experienced slavery longer than many who told their stories in this period. Here she recalls life with her parents and sisters on the Kilpatrick family plantation in Black River, Louisiana.

Massa Kilpatrick wasn’t no piddlin’ man. He was a man of plenty. He had a big house. . . . He was a medicine doctor and they was rooms in the second story for sick folks what come to lay in. It would take two days to go all over the land he owned. He had cattle and stock and sheep and more’n a hundred slaves and more besides. He bought the bes’ of niggers near every time the spec’lators come that way. He’d make a swap of the old ones and give money for young ones what could work. . . .

He raised corn and cotton and cane and ’taters and goobers [potatoes and peanuts], ’sides the peas and other feedin’ for the niggers. I ’member I helt a hoe handle mighty onsteady when they put a old women to larn me and some other chillun to scrape the fields. . . . She say, “For the love of Gawd, you better larn it right, or Solomon will beat the breath out you body.” Old man Solomon was the nigger driver. . . .

The times I hated most was pickin’ cotton when the frost was on the bolls. My hands git sore and crack open and bleed. We’d have a li’l fire in the fields and iffen the ones with tender hands couldn’t stand it no longer, we’d run and warm our hands a li’l bit. . . .

Sometimes massa let niggers have a li’l patch. They’d raise ’taters or goobers . . . to help fill out on the victuals. . . .

Once in a while they’s give us a li’l piece of Sat’day evenin’ to wash out clothes. . . . When they’d git through with the clothes on Sat’day evenin’s the niggers . . . brung fiddles and guitars and come out and play. The others clap they hands and stomp they feet and we young’uns cut a step round. I was plenty biggity and like to cut a step.

We was scart of Solomon and his whip, though, and he didn’t like frolickin’. He didn’t like for us niggers to pray, either. We never heared of no church, but us have prayin’ in the cabins. . . . I know that Solomon is burnin’ in hell today, and it pleasures me to know it.

Once my maw and paw taken me and Katherine after night to slip to ’nother place to a prayin’ and singin’. A nigger man with white beard told us a day am comin’ when niggers only be slaves of Gawd. We prays for the end of Trib’lation and the end of beatin’s and for shoes that fit our feet. We prayed that us niggers could have all we wanted to eat and special for fresh meat. . . .

When we’s comin’ back from that prayin’, I thunk I heared the nigger [tracking] dogs and somebody on horseback. . . . Maw listens and say, “Sho ’nough, them dogs am runnin’ and Gawd help us!” Then she and paw . . . take us to a fence corner and stands us up ’gainst the rails and say don’t move. . . . They went to the woods, so the hounds chase them and not git us. Me and Katherine stand there, holdin’ hands, shakin’ so we can hardly stand. We hears the hounds come nearer, but we don’t move. They goes after paw and maw, but they circles round to the cabins and gits in. Maw say its the power of Gawd.

Source: Ex-Slave Stories: Mary Reynolds, in “Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1938,” American Memory, Library of Congress, Texas, vol. 16, pt. 3, pp. 238–41.