ts, my las' un, he died 'bout seventeen years ago.

"I ain't never seed but one hant in my life, an' I didn' know it wuz a
hant 'til Aunt Peggy (an old slave woman) tole me so. Dis hant was in de
shape o' a duck, an' it followed me one day frum de big house kitchen
ter de hawg pen whar I wuz gwine ter slop de hawgs. When I got back, I
said, 'Aunt Peggy, dar's a strange duck done tuck up wid us!' And she
say, 'hush, chile, dat's a hant!' I been seein' 'im fur severrel years!
An' dat sholy skeert me!"

When asked if she had ever been whipped when a slave, "Aunt" Mary
replied, "Yes, and thank God fur it, fur ole Miss taught me to be hones'
an' not to steal." She admitted that being whipped for stealing made her
an honest woman.

"Aunt" Mary's oldest child is now a man of 74. Her hair is as white as
cotton and her eye sight is dim, but she is still mentally alert. She
says that colored people are naturally religious and that they learned
all their "devilment" from the Whites. She deplores the wickedness into
which the world has drifted, but thanks God that slavery ended when it
did.

She has never had any particular love for the Yankees, and thinks that
they treated the Southern white folks "most scandalously" after the
war, yet feels that she owes them a debt of gratitude for freeing her
people. She admits that her awful hatred of slavery was born of her sad
experience as a girl when she was so unceremoniously separated from her
loved ones, as previously told. She is also of the firm opinion the
those "speculataws" who brought her from Maryland to Georgia in 1860 are
"brilin in hell fur dey sin" of seperating her from her people.

Must Jesus bear the cross alone
and all the world go free?
No, there is a cross for every one;
there's a cross for me;
This consecrated cross I shall bear til
death shall set me free,
And then go home, my crown to wear;
there is a crown for me.

Sung for interviewer by Mary Ferguson, ex-slave, December 18, 1936.

FOLKLORE INTERVIEW

CARRIE NANCY FRYER
415 Mill Street
Augusta, Georgia

Written by:
Miss Maude Barragan
Federal Writers' Project
Residency #13
Augusta, Georgia

An angular, red-skinned old Negro women was treading heavily down the
dusty sidewalk, leaning on a gnarled stick and talking to a little black
girl. A "sundown" hat shaded a bony face of typical Indian cast and her
red skin was stretched so tight over high cheek bones that few wrinkles