Up From Slavery: An Autobiography | Page 8

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. She snatched a few moments
for our care in the early morning before her work began, and at night after the day's work
was done. One of my earliest recollections is that of my mother cooking a chicken late at
night, and awakening her children for the purpose of feeding them. How or where she got
it I do not know. I presume, however, it was procured from our owner's farm. Some
people may call this theft. If such a thing were to happen now, I should condemn it as
theft myself. But taking place at the time it did, and for the reason that it did, no one
could ever make me believe that my mother was guilty of thieving. She was simply a
victim of the system of slavery. I cannot remember having slept in a bed until after our
family was declared free by the Emancipation Proclamation. Three children--John, my
older brother, Amanda, my sister, and myself--had a pallet on the dirt floor, or, to be
more correct, we slept in and on a bundle of filthy rags laid upon the dirt floor.
I was asked not long ago to tell something about the sports and pastimes that I engaged in
during my youth. Until that question was asked it had never occurred to me that there was
no period of my life that was devoted to play. From the time that I can remember
anything, almost every day of my life had been occupied in some kind of labour; though I
think I would now be a more useful man if I had had time for sports. During the period
that I spent in slavery I was not large enough to be of much service, still I was occupied
most of the time in cleaning the yards, carrying water to the men in the fields, or going to
the mill to which I used to take the corn, once a week, to be ground. The mill was about
three miles from the plantation. This work I always dreaded. The heavy bag of corn
would be thrown across the back of the horse, and the corn divided about evenly on each
side; but in some way, almost without exception, on these trips, the corn would so shift as
to become unbalanced and would fall off the horse, and often I would fall with it. As I
was not strong enough to reload the corn upon the horse, I would have to wait, sometimes
for many hours, till a chance passer-by came along who would help me out of my trouble.
The hours while waiting for some one were usually spent in crying. The time consumed
in this way made me late in reaching the mill, and by the time I got