Texas Slave Narrative
Jack Payne
I was born in 1844, in San Augustine County, near the Sabine County line. My father's name was Jim Hankla and my mother's was Martha Payne . I had seven sisters and six brothers. They are all dead now. I don't know where my folks come from. First I remember was my ma and us chilluns being sold off the block to Mistress Payne . The quarters was about one hundred yards from the big house, and when I was a little nigger, too little to work in the field, I stayed at the big house most of the time and helped Mistress Payne feed the chickens, make scarecrows to keep the hawks away and put wood on the fires. After I got big enough to hoe, I went to the field same as the other niggers. In the summer time after the crop was laid by I helped to cut wood for winter, build fences, cut bushes and drive a wagon hauling freight from Shreveport and Sabine Town. No man, I never earned any money for myself. What use I have for money then? I didn't hardly know what money looked like till after freedom. What did I eat? Mostly meat, sorghum syrup and bread. I eat so much beef during slavery time I aint never like it since. Them days most everything to eat was cooked in big iron pots on the fireplace and sometimes bread was cooked in the hot ashes and that was called ash cakes. No the slaves didn't have no separate gardens, old Mistress measured out the rations to each family.
My Master was Mr. Ben Payne . He married Miss Annie Epps . They had seven children, four boys and three girls. They lived in a big double pin house made of hewed logs and had two stick and dirt chimneys with great big fireplaces. The overseer, he was the man who tended to everything about the plantation, told us what to plant here and what to plant there and seen that everybody worked. He'd blow a horn at four o'clock every morning and that meant for everybody to get up. We'd get to work by daylight or sun-up and work till de horn blow for dinner, then we would go back after dinner and work till dark. There was about 175 acres in this plantation and seventy-five or eighty slaves, counting babies and all. No man, there wasn't no church on this plantation, sometimes we had preaching under a brush arbor. I didn't go to preaching or baptizing much. We always had a big Christmas dinner and didn't have to work that day but we didn't have no other holidays, even Saturday evening. And when night come we went to bed, we was too tired to go to dances or meeting either. No I don't believe in 'haints', folks what think they see haints has a reason to believe they didn'.When slaves were sick old Mistress had a doctor to ten' on them all this making medicine out of roots and leaves got started since freedom. Yessum, I remember about the war, but it didn't make no difference in our livin' till it done over with.
The day it was over Marster called us all together and say, 'Now you all is jest as free as I am. You can stay with me or you can go where you pleases. You aint got no more Master, 'cept the good Lord.' I stayed about six months, then jest lived about, first one place then another. I married Lizzie Kirkley , we had four boys. We separated and she took the chillun, I aint seed them since, I don't know if they livin' or if I has any grandchillun. Last time I married a woman named Mandy Mitchell , she ceased about two years ago and I live with her son.
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