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Chapter I. I WAS born a slave on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia. I
am not quite sure of the exact place or exact date of my birth, but at any rate
I suspect I must have been born somewhere and at some time. As nearly as I have
been able to learn, I was born near a cross-roads post-office called Hale's
Ford, and the year was 1858 or 1859. I do not know the month or the day. The
earliest impressions I can now recall are of the plantation and the slave
quarters -- the latter being the part of the plantation where the slaves had
their cabins.
My life had its beginning in the midst of the most miserable,
desolate, and discouraging surroundings. This was so, however, not because my
owners were especially cruel, for they were not, as compared with many others. I
was born in a typical log cabin, about fourteen by sixteen feet square. In this
cabin I lived with my mother and a brother and sister till after the Civil War,
when we were all declared free. Of my ancestry I know almost nothing. In the
slave quarters, and even later, I heard whispered conversations among the
coloured people of the tortures which the slaves, including, no doubt, my
ancestors on my mother's side, suffered in the middle passage of the slave ship
while being conveyed from Africa to America. I have been unsuccessful in
securing any information that would throw any accurate light upon the history of
my family beyond my mother. She, I remember, had a half-brother and a
half-sister. In the days of slavery not very much attention was given to family
history and family records -- that is, black family records. My mother, I
suppose, attracted the attention of a purchaser who was afterward my owner and
hers. Her addition to the slave family attracted about as much attention as the
purchase of a new horse or cow. Of my father I know even less than of my mother.
I do not even know his name. I have heard reports to the effect that he was a
white man who lived on one of the near-by plantations. Whoever he was, I never
heard of his taking the least interest in me or providing in any way for my
rearing. But I do not find especial fault with him. He was simply another
unfortunate victim of the institution which the Nation unhappily had engrafted
upon it at that time. The cabin was not only our living-place, but was also used
as the kitchen for the plantation. My mother was the plantation cook. The cabin
was without glass windows; it had only openings in the side which let in the
light, and also the cold, chilly air of winter. There was a door to the cabin --
that is, something that was called a door -- but the uncertain hinges by which
it was hung, and the large cracks in it, to say nothing of the fact that it was
too small, made the room a very uncomfortable one. In addition to these openings
there was, in the lower right-hand corner of the room, the cat-hole, -- a
contrivance which almost every mansion or cabin in Virginia possessed during the
ante-bellum period. The cat-hole was a square opening, about seven by eight
inches, provided for the purpose of letting the cat pass in and out of the house
at will during the night. In the case of our particular cabin I could never
understand the necessity for this convenience, since there were at least a
half-dozen other places in the cabin that would have accommodated the cats.
There was no wooden floor in our cabin, the naked earth being used as a floor.
In the centre of the earthen floor there was a large, deep opening covered with
boards, which was used as a place in which to store sweet potatoes during the
winter. An impression of this potato- hole is very distinctly engraved upon my
memory, because I recall that during the process of putting the potatoes in or
taking them out I would often come into possession of one or two, which I
roasted and thoroughly enjoyed. There was no cooking-stove on our plantation,
and all the cooking for the whites and slaves my mother had to do over an open
fireplace, mostly in pots and skillets. While the poorly built cabin caused us
to suffer with cold in the winter, the heat from the open fireplace in summer
was equally trying. The early years of my life, which were spent in the little
cabin, were not very different from those of thousands of other slaves. My
mother, of course, had little time in which to give attention to the training of
her children during the day.
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