I WAS A SLAVE: Book 2: The Lives of Slave Men

WES BRADY: “We niggers lived in log houses and slep’ on hay mattress with lowell covers, and et [ate] fat pork and cornbread and ’lasses [molasses] and all kinds garden stuff. If we et flour bread, our women folks had to slip [steal] the flour siftin’s from Missy’s kitchen and darsn’t [dare not] let the white folks know it. We wore one riggin’ lowell clothes a year. I never had shoes on ’til after surrender come. ... The overseer was ’straddle his big horse at three o’clock in the mornin’, roustin’ the hands off to the field. He got them all lined up and then [he] come back to the house for breakfas’. The rows was a mile long and no matter how much grass was in them, if you leaves one sprig on your row, they beats you nearly to death. Lots of times they weighed the cotton by candlelight. All the hands took dinner to the field in buckets and the overseer give them fifteen minutes to git dinner. He’d start cuffin’ [hitting] some of them over the head when it was time to stop eatin’ and go back to work.”