Voices from Slavery by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780486131016
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2012-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

GEORGE KYE

Interviewed at Fort Gibson, Oklahoma

Interviewer not identified

Age when interviewed: 110

I WAS BORN in Arkansas under Mr. Abraham Stover, on a big farm about twenty miles north of Van Buren. I was plumb grown when the Civil War come along, but I can remember back when the Cherokee Indians was in all that part of the country.

Joe Kye was my pappy’s name what he was born under back in Garrison County, Virginia, and I took that name when I was freed, but I don’t know whether he took it or not because he was sold off by old Master Stover when I was a child. I never have seen him since. I think he wouldn’t mind good, leastways that what my mammy say.

My mammy was named Jennie and I don’t think I had any brothers or sisters, but they was a whole lot of children at the quarters that I played and lived with. I didn’t live with Mammy because she worked all the time, and us children all stayed in one house. It was a little one room log cabin, chinked and daubed, and you couldn’t stir us with a stick. When we went to eat we had a big pan and all ate out of it. One what ate the fastest got the most.

Us children wore homespun shirts and britches and little slips, and nobody but the big boys wore any britches. I wore just a shirt until I was about twelve years old, but it had a long tail down to my calves. Four or five of us boys slept in one bed, and it was made of hewed logs with rope laced across it and a shuck mattress. We had stew made out of pork and potatoes, and sometimes greens and pot liquor, and we had ash cake mostly, but biscuits about once a month. In the winter time I had brass toed shoes made on the place, and a cloth cap with ear flaps.

The work I done was hoeing and plowing, and I rid a horse a lot for Old Master because I was a good rider. He would send me to run chores for him, like going to the mill. He never beat his Negroes, but he talked mighty cross and glared at us until he would nearly scare us to death sometimes.

He told us the rules and we lived by them and didn’t make trouble, but they was a neighbor that had some mean Negroes and he nearly beat them to death. We could hear them hollering in the field sometimes. They would sleep in the cotton rows and run off, and then they would catch the cat-o-nine-tails sure ’nough. He would chain them up too, and keep them tied out to trees, and when they went to the field they would be chained together in bunches sometimes after they had been cutting up.

We didn’t have no place to go to church, but Old Master didn’t care if we had singing and praying,

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