SARAH WOODS BURKE
Aged 85


"Yessir, I guess you all would call me an ex-slave cause I was born in
Grayson County, West Virginia and on a plantation I lived for quite a
spell, that is until when I was seven years old when we all moved up
here to Washington county."

"My Pappy's old Mammy was supposed to have been sold into slavery when
my Pappy was one month old and some poor white people took him ter
raise. We worked for them until he was a growed up man, also 'til they
give him his free papers and 'lowed him to leave the plantation and come
up here to the North."

"How did we live on the plantation? Well--you see it was like this we
lived in a log cabin with the ground for floors and the beds were built
against the walls jus' like bunks. I 'member that the slaves had a hard
time getting food, most times they got just what was left over or
whatever the slaveholder wanted to give them so at night they would slip
outa their cabins on to the plantation and kill a pig, a sheep or some
cattle which they would butcher in the woods and cut up. The wimmin
folks would carry the pieces back to the cabins in their aprons while
the men would stay behind and bury the head, skin and feet."

"Whenever they killed a pig they would have to skin it, because they
didn't dare to build a fire. The women folk after getting home would put
the meat in special dug trenches and the men would come erlong and cover
it up."