Aunt Adeline

Aunt Adeline was born into slavery in 1848. She and her mother were sold to a slave owner in Arkansas when she was one year old. In her description of her time as a slave she talks about being scared only once. The incident she talks about where she was scared is when she was very young and worked in a stage coach stop. She was playing church with her friend and they were singing ‘Jesus my all to heaven is gone’ when they realised some stagecoach passengers were listening to them sing. When they discovered they were being watched they both ran because they were terrified of the consequences but were coaxed back by the passengers with a dime.

In her narrative she also talks about how she had been told that she was of African descent and that if the whites had never taken her people from Africa they would be much better off. I find it interesting that she describes her owners as treating her well even though she was whipped. She says that the white children were also whipped aswell though.

After the end of the Civil War she recounts that she did not want to leave ‘the only house she had ever known’. This was even after soldiers came to the house telling her old owner to let her go. This led to her becoming an outcast and threatened for not leaving.

The owners of Aunt Adeline were not as evil as some slave owners and made sure all their slaves ate well and wore good clothing. When she was young her uncle was the coach driver for the owner’s family and after the war the owners gave the coach to her uncle and bought himself a new one.

Aunt Adeline says towards the end that she can ‘remember the days of slavery as happy ones’ which seems quite odd, but being born into it it’s all she knew. The interviewer writes at the end that she is still working as a caretaker even though she is nearing ninety and that she ‘rarely associates with the colored people of the town’. I’m not really sure why she isolated herself from other African Americans but it could go back to when she refused to leave her old owners house after the Civil War was over as maybe she was still an outcast from the community.

This account was interesting as it did not really show slavery as being an evil thing which all slaves wanted to be free of as she did not really want to change anything and was happy with the life she lived as a slave. This is most probably down to the fact that her owners were not treating her awfully and she was only 15 when the Civil War happened and Slavery ended.

https://www.loc.gov/resource/mesn.021/?sp=16