3

(A Negro Cook's Day)

- 3 -

always had enough corn and syrup to eat and kept a small garden,
hut we never had much meat. I likes hog meat the best.

We moved away from there when I was little and went up near
Camilla, Georgia, where we farmed. The house was just a cabin
out in the fields and we farmed "on halves" — that is, the white
man furnished the land and mules and fertilizer and we did all the
work. We planted cotton and corn.

We played around the house and worked in the fields and I
helped out with nursing the young children and working around the
house. We didn't have many clothes, but we didn't need many — it
hardly ever got so awfully cold down there and we had lightwood
to burn during the winter months. We all had good times in hog-
killing time in the fall, after the cotton was picked and the
corn was in, 'cause there was always lots of chitlin's and hog
meat to eat.

I got married when I was about twelve or thirteen — I don't
remember exactly — but I had "courted" some before that. Me and
my husband got us a little farm and stayed there for a few years.
We were tenant farmers and at the end of the year we never had
anything except some more debts.

Me and my first husband didn't have any children. But he
died after about a year or so, so I moved to Ozark and got
married again. I hadn't worked in the fields all my life but was
sort of a house nigger, and could cook and clean up, and I grad-
ually got to where I was a pretty good maid. Course I'm a little
slow, account of being kinder fat, but I keeps everything clean.

No ma'm, I ain't got no husband right now. Well, I has got

3