Good Morning POU! We cannot let anyone rewrite this history.
James Martin – on the slave auctions
The slaves are put in stalls like the pens they use for cattle- a man and his wife with a child on each arm. And there’s a curtain, sometimes just a sheet over the front of the stall, so the bidders can’t see the “stock” too soon. The overseer’s standin’ just outside with a big blacksnake whip and pepperbox pistol in his belt. Across the square a little piece, ther’s a big platform with steps leadin’ to it.
Then, they pulls up the curtain, and the bidders is crowdin’ around. Them in back can’t see, so the overseer drives the slaves out to the platform, and he tells the ages of the slaves and what they can do. They have white gloves there, and one of the bidders takes a pair of gloves and rubs his fingers over the man’s teeth, and he says to the overseer, “You call this buck twenty years old? What there’s cup worms in his teeth. He’s forty years old, if he’s a day.” So they knock this buck down for a thousand dollars. The calls the men “bucks” and the women “wenches”.
When the slave is on the platform- what they calls the “block”- the overseer yells, “Tom or Jason, show the bidders how you walk.” Then, the slaves step across the platform, and the biddin’ starts.
At these slave auctions, the overseer yells, “Say, you bucks and wenches, get in your hole. Come out here.” Then he makes ’em hop, he makes ’em trot, he makes ’em jump. “How much, ” he yells, “for this buck? A thousand? Eleven hundred? Twelve hundred dollars?”. Then the bidders makes offers accordin’ to size and build.
Shang Harris – on white people and stealing
Dey talks a heap ’bout de niggers stealin’. Well, you know what was de fust stealin’done? Hit was in Africy, when de white folks stole de niggers, jes’ like you’d go get a drove o’ hosses and sell ’em.
Katie Sutton – on being told slave children were hatched
Ole Missus and young Missus told the little slave children that the stork brought the white babies to their mothers, but that the slave children were all hatched out from buzzards’ eggs. And we believed it was true.
Anderson Furr – on life after the Civil War
One of them Kluxers come to our house and set down and talked to us ’bout how us ought to act, and how us was goin’ to have to do, if us ‘spected to live and do well. Us allus thought it was our own old marster, all dressed up in dem white robes, wid his face kivvered up, and a-talkin’ in a strange, put-on lak, voice.
Found Voices : Slave Narratives The Full Broadcast -Nightline 1999