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Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves, Volume XI, North Carolina Narratives, Part 2

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[Pg 431] <div class='left'> <table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="hilliardyellerday"> <tr><td align='left'>N.C. District:</td><td align='left'> No. 2</td></tr> <tr><td align='left'>Worker:</td><td align='left'>T. Pat Matthews</td></tr> <tr><td align='left'>No. Words:</td><td align='left'>398</td></tr> <tr><td align='left'>Subject:</td><td align='left'>HILLIARD YELLERDAY (A SLAVE STORY)</td></tr> <tr><td align='left'>Reference:</td><td align='left'>Hilliard Yellerday</td></tr> <tr><td align='left'>Editor:</td><td align='left'>George L. Andrews</td></tr> </table></div> <hr style="width: 25%;" /> [Pg 432] <h2>HILLIARD YELLERDAY</h2> <h4>1112 Oakwood Avenue, Raleigh North Carolina. </h4> "My mother and father told me many interesting stories of slavery and of its joys and sorrows. From what they told me there was two sides to the picture. One was extremely bad and the other was good. "These features of slavery were also dependent on the phases of human attitude and temperment which also was good or bad. If the master was broadminded, with a love in his heart for his fellowman, his slaves were at no disadvantage because of their low social standing and their lack of a voice in the civil affairs of the community, state, and nation. On the other hand if the master was narrowminded, overbearing and cruel the case was reversed and the situation the slaves were placed in caused a condition to exist concerning their general welfare that was bad and the slave was as low socially as the swine or other animals on the plantation. "Some owners gave their slaves the same kind of food served on their own tables and allowed the slaves the same privileges enjoyed by their own children. Other masters fed their slave children from troughs made very much like those from which the hogs of the plantation were fed.[Pg 433] There were many instances where they were given water in which the crumbs and refuse from the masters table had been placed. They gathered around this food with gourds and muscle shells from the fresh-water creeks and ate from this trough. Such a condition was very bad indeed." [HW: begin] "My mother was named Maggie Yellerday, and my father was named Sam Yellerday. They belonged to Dr. Jonathan Yellerday, who owned a large plantation and over a hundred slaves. His plantation looked like a small town. He had blacksmith shops, shoe shops, looms for weaving cloth, a corn mill, and a liquor distillery. There was a tanyard covering more than a quarter of an acre where he tanned the hides of animals to use in making shoes. There was a large bell they used to wake the slaves, in the morning, and to call them to their meals during the day. He had carriages and horses, stable men and carriage men. The carriage master and his family rode in was called a coach by the slaves on the plantation. His house had eighteen rooms, a large hall, and four large porches. The house set in a large grove about one mile square and the slave quarters were arranged in rows at the back of master's great house. The nearest cabins were about one hundred yards from it. "Dr. Jonathan Yellerday looked after slaves' health and the food was fair, but the slaves were worked by overseers who made it hard for them, as he allowed them to[Pg 434] whip a slave at will. He had so many slaves he did not know all their names. His fortune was his slaves. He did not sell slaves and he did not buy many, the last ten years preceding the war. He resorted to raising his own slaves. "When a girl became a woman she was required to go to a man and become a mother. There was generally a form of marriage. The master read a paper to them telling them they were man and wife. Some were married by the master laying down a broom and the two slaves, man and woman would jump over it. The master would then tell them they were man and wife and they could go to bed together. Master would sometimes go and get a large hale hearty Negro man from some other plantation to go to his Negro woman. He would ask the other master to let this man come over to his place to go to his slave girls. A slave girl was expected to have children as soon as she became a woman. Some of them had children at the age of twelve and thirteen years old. Negro men six feet tall went to some of these children. "Mother said there were cases where these young girls loved someone else and would have to receive the attentions of men of the master's choice. This was a general custom. This state of affairs tended to loosen the morals of the Negro race and they have never fully recovered from its effect. Some slave women would have dozens of men during their life. Negro women who had had a half dozen mock husbands in[Pg 435] slavery time were plentiful. The holy bonds of matrimony did not mean much to a slave. The masters called themselves Christians, went to church worship regularly and yet allowed this condition to exist. Mother, father, sister and I were sent as refugees from Mississippi to N.C. They were afraid the Yankees would get us in Mississippi. I was only four years old when the war ended as I was born April 6, 1861 so I do not remember the trip. We were sent to Warren County to the Brownloe's plantation where we stayed until the war ended. "There was a question as to just what Mississippi would do and then mother said the Doctor feared we would be taken by the Yankees there so he sent us to N.C. to the above named County. Mother was sent to stay with Mrs. Green Parrish and she took me with her. Mr. Green Parrish was gone to the war. In the last of the war, he was wounded and sent home. While he was recovering I fanned the flies off him. That's the first thing I remember about the war. When he got well he went back and then the war soon ended. After the war ended father and the family moved to Halifax County and worked on a farm belonging to Mr. Sterling Johnston. I was in Warren County when I first began to remember anything and I do not have any specific remembrance of the Yankees. We stayed in Halifax County eighteen years, going from one plantation to another, but we made no money. The landlords got all we made except what we ate and wore.[Pg 436] They would always tell us we ate ours up. Sometimes we would be almost naked, barefooted and hungry when the crop was housed and then the landlord would make us leave. We would go to another with about the same results. "There was a story going that each slave would get forty acres of land and a mule at the end of the war. The Yankees started this story but the mule and land was never given and slaves were turned out without anything and with nowhere to go. "We moved to Wake County and I farmed until 1903. I had not gotten one hundred dollars ahead in all this time so I got a job with the railroad, S.A.L. Shops in Raleigh, N.C. and that is the only place I ever made any money. "Father died in 1900 and mother in 1923. I worked from 1903 until 1920 with the S.A.L. Railroad as flunkey. I worked as box packer and machinist's helper. Mother and father died without ever owning a house but I saved my money while working for the Railroad Company and bought this lot 157 X 52-1/2 and had this house built on it. The house has five rooms and cost about one thousand dollars. I've been so of late years I could not pay my taxes. I am partially blind and unable to work anymore." EH <hr style="width: 95%;" /> <h3>Transcriber's Notes</h3> All footnotes use numbers for consistency, and are reindexed. Contractions match original text and are inconsistent due to the variety of narrators and interviewers. Page 5: Retained "Progro Marshells" and "Provo Marshell" inconsistency. Pages 425-427 and 431-433: Retained inconsistent spellings for "Yelladay", "Yellady", and "Yellerday". Handwritten edits to punctuation, nested quotation marks, and the following typos have been silently corrected: Page 24: Changed "wnated" to "wanted" (I wnated ter go wid him). Page 35: Changed "ha" to "he" (an' when ha azed dem who dey wus). Page 45: Changed "Ca8olina" to "Carolina" (de No'th Ca8olina line). Page 67: Changed "do" to "de" (set fire to do cotton). Page 167: Changed "creulty" to "cruelty" (stops creulty on plantation). Page 170: Changed "sn'" to "an'" (Jake, sn' he 'longed ter a family). Page 249: Changed "I8d" to "I'd" (I8d learn ah half uh chaptuh) and (an I8d write stories about Christ). <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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