Remembering Slavery

Remembering Slavery

Mr. Fountain Hughes was born a slave in 1848 in Charlottesville, Virginia. In 1944 (or 1949) he was interviewed in Baltimore by Hermond Norwood, a representative of the Library of Congress’s Archive of Folk Song. The Federal Writer’s Project, a Depression-era program, had initiated the government’s effort to capture the memories of the, by then, very elderly former slaves. Hughes recalled not only life under slavery but also the difficulties many slaves faced in making the transition to freedom in an antagonistic white society that worked hard to impede their efforts. Conditions for the Hughes family under freedom were materially not much better than they had been under slavery. In this interview Hughes recalled how his widowed mother supported her family by binding, or contracting, her children out to work. Still, Hughes asserted, he far preferred freedom to slavery.

Mr. Hughes was 101 years old during this interview and he spoke clear, concise, and his memory was remarkable. He recalls being barefooted until he was twelve or thirteen years old and boys during that time period wore dresses not pants. Colored people did not have beds they slept on the floor and slaves were not allowed to look at a book. Mr. Hughes compared slavery to jail. He said, “Dogs has got it now better than we had it when we came along”. They were slaves who belonged to people and would be sold like horses, cows, and hogs on an auction bench bidding the same as cattle. Selling women and men to black traders and shipped colored people down south to be sold. The auctions would be every month at the courthouse; sold for one hundred to five hundred dollars. Mr. Hughes was never sold; he stayed with the same master. After the war, his father was died and his mother put Hughes and his siblings to work to help take care of the others. Mr. Hughes, though young did recall the Civil War. He remembered the Yankees coming along and taking all the good horses, threw all...