When I Was a Slave: Memoirs from the Slave Narrative Collection (Dover Thrift Editions) by When I Was a Slave; Memoirs from the Slave Narrative Collection (2002)

Author:When I Was a Slave; Memoirs from the Slave Narrative Collection (2002)
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780486111391
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2012-02-29T21:00:00+00:00

LEWIS JENKINS

Interviewed in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Interviewed by Ida Belle Hunter Age when interviewed: 93

I WAS born in Green County, Alabama in January 1844. My mother was a white woman, and her name was Jane Jenkins. My father was a nigger. He was a coachman on my master’s place. I was told this in 1880 by the white doctor, Lyth Smith, which brung me into the world. My master, who was my grandfather, brung me to Texas when I was just seven or eight years old. A few years later, he brung my mother down to Texas, and she had with her three boys, which was her chillen and my brothers. They was white chillen and named Jones. They first names was Tom, Joe, and Lije. They parted from me and I never heerd no more about ’em. I didn’t even know my mother when I seen her. All my life I done just knowed my white kinfolks and nothing at all about the other part of my color.

Before I was born, my mother was taken away from her playmates and kept in the attic hid. They took me soon as I was born from her. When her time to be in bed was up, she’d ask the waitman where I was at. The waitman was Dr. Lyth Smith. He’d tell her I was at Ann’s house. I never got a chance to nurse my mother. After she got up and come down, she wanted to see her baby. Now she goes to Ann’s house and couldn’t find me. After she couldn’t find me there, she looked in all the houses on the place for me, her baby. Then she commenced screaming, tearing her clothes off and tearing her hair out. They sent her to the calaboose till they could get some clothes to put on. She went distracted. She tore out towards town. The way they got her to hush, they told her I was with my grandma. They had me hid on the road to Texas. The doctor’s wife said I was the first nigger she shed a tear over. It was a destruction thing.

Well, that scandalized the family, and they moved to Texas and come by and got me and took me to Texas. When they crossed the Tom Bigby River in Alabama, three miles wide, on boat, this woman that had me in hand, was just churning me up and down in the river. They hollered at her, and I says that’s where God took me in his bosom. When I was seven or eight years old, the white folks took me in charge. They was gonna make me a watchman to watch for ’em at night. But when they begun this, I wasn’t old enough to remember.

The first house I was sent to was the cook’s house. The cook said, “What you come down here for?” I told her I didn’t know. “Who sent you?” I said, “Old Master Jenkins.” She knowed ’mediately what I

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