Decades after this formerly enslaved woman was sold from Texas to Georgia, 90-year-old Annie Hawkins recounted in a slave narrative her torturous experience of slavery at the hands of masochistic white owners. These are her words.
I never had no whitefolks that was good to me. We all worked jest like dogs and had about half enough to eat and got whupped for everything. Our days was a constant misery to us.
I seen old Master git mad at Truman he buckled him down across a barrel and whupped him till he cut the blood out of him and then he rubbed salt and pepper in the raw places…
I know that don’t sound reasonable that a white man in a Christian community would do such a thing but you can’t realize how heartless he was.
Old Mistress and her three girls was mean to us too. One time me and my sister was spinning and old Mistress went to the well-house and she found a chicken snake and killed it.
She brought it back and she throwed it around my sister’s neck. She jest laughed and laughed about it. She thought it was a big joke.
[Old Master] finally killed hisself drinking and I remember Old Mistress called us in to look at him in his coffin. We all marched by him slow like and I jest happened to look up and caught my sister’s eye and we both jest natchelly laughed - Why shouldn’t we? We was glad he was dead.
You must remember he owned us body and soul and they wasn’t anything we could do about it.