they did. The women were beat and made to go to them. They were big fine
men, and the masters wanted the women to have children by them. And
there were some white men, too, who forced the slave women to do what
they wanted to. Some of them didn't want to stop when slavery stopped."

Slave Tasks and Hours of Work

"I've told you the slaves were tasked to the limit. The hours of the
slave hands--if it was summer time--he must be in the field when the sun
rose. And he must come home and eat his dinner and get back in the field
and stay till the sun went down. In the winter time he must be out there
by the time it was light enough to see the work and stay out till it was
just too dark to see the work with just enough time out to stop and eat
his dinner. This was just after slavery that I remember. But the hours
were the same then. The average on cotton picking was two hundred pounds
a day. Pulling fodder was a hundred bundles. Gathering corn and such as
that was all they could do."

Wages just after Freedom

"The average wage that a man got for twenty-six days' work--twenty-six
days were counted a working month--was eight dollars and board for the
month. That was the average wage for work like that. That is the way
they worked then."

This Matter of Slave Clothes Again

"Clothes!!! They didn't know nothing 'bout underclothes. They didn't
wear them just after the War, and I know they didn't before the War--not
in my part of Alabama. That's the reason why they say the Negro is cold
natured. He didn't have anything on. I have seen many a boy picking and
chopping cotton on a cold autumn day with nothing on but his shirt. In
his bare feet too. He got one pair of shoes a year and he didn't get no
more. When he wore them out, he didn't have any till the next year.

"When I was a boy I have seen many a young lady walk to church with her
shoes flung over her shoulders and wait till she got nearly there before
she would put them on. She didn't want to wear them out too soon.

"I didn't have to undergo this myself.

"When I was ten years old, my job was to drive a [HW: ox] team
twenty-six miles, and it took me two days to go and two days to come and
one day to load and unload--five days. The team was loaded with cotton
going and anything coming back. We used to get salt from some place near
New Orleans. We would drive ox teams down there, put in on order, wait
till they dipped the water out of the lake, boiled the sal