Perkins, Rachel

The following data is extracted from Arkansas Slave Narratives.

Interviewer: Miss Irene Robertson Person interviewed: Rachel Perkins, Goodwin, Arkansas Age: ? Baby during the Civil War


"I was born in Greensboro, Alabama. Sallie Houston and Peter Houston was my parents. They had two girls and a boy. They died when they was small, but me. They always told me mother died when I was three days old in the cradle. I don't fur a fact know much about my own people. Miss Agnes took me to raise me fur a house girl. She nursed me wid her Mary. My mother's and father's owners was Alonso Brown and Miss Agnes Brown. Their two girls was Mary and Lucy and their three boys was Bobby, Jesse, and Frank. Miss Agnes rocked the babies to sleep in a big chair out on the gallery. We slept there all night. Company come and say, 'Where the babies?' Miss Agnes take them back and show us off. They say, 'Where the little black chile?' They'd try to get me to come go live wid them. They say they be good to me. I'd tell 'em, 'No, I stay here.' It was good a home as I wanted. We slept on the front gallery till Lucy come on, then we had sheep skin pallets. She got the big chair. She put us out there because it was cool.

"I left Miss Agnes when I got to be my own woman. Didn't nobody toll me off. I knowed I ought to go to my own race of people. They come after me once. Then they sent the baby boy after me what I had nursed. I wanted to go but I never went. Miss Lucy and Miss Mary both in college. It was lonesome for me. I wanted to go to my color. I jus' picked up and walked on off.

"My girl is half Indian. I'm fifteen years older than my girl. Then I married Wesley Perkins, my husband. He is black fur a fact. He died last fall. I married at my husband's brother's by a colored preacher. Tom Screws was his name. He was a Baptist preacher.

"I never went to school a day in my life. I can't read. I can count money. Seem lack it jus' come natural. I never learned it at no one time. It jus' come to me.

"In warm weather I slept on the gallery and in cold weather I slept by the fire. I made down my own bed. I cleaned the house. I took the cows off to the pasture. I nursed the babies, washed and dried the dishes. I made up the beds and cleaned the yards.

"Master Brown owned two farms. He had plenty hands on his farms. I did never go down to the farms much but I knowed the hands. On Saturday little later than other days they brought the stock to the house and fed. Then they went to the smokehouse for their rations. He had a great big garden, strawberries, and grape arbors.

"One thing I had to do was worm the plants. I put the worms in a bottle and leave it in the row where the sun would dry the worms up. When a light frost come I would water the plants that would wilt before the sun riz and ag'in at night. Then the plants never felt the frost. Certainly it didn't kill 'em. It didn't hurt 'em.

"Julane was the regular milk woman. She milked and strained the milk. I churned and 'tended to the chickens. Miss Agnes sot the hens her own self. She marked the eggs with a piece of charcoal to see if other hens laid by the setting hen. If they did she'd take the new egg out of the nest.

"We had flower gardens. We had mint, rosemary, tansy, sage, mullen, catnip, horseradish, artichokes, hoarhound-all good home remedies.

"I never knowed when we moved to that farm. I was so small. I heard Miss Agnes Brown say I was a baby when they moved to Boldan depot, not fur from Clinton, Mississippi.

"When I left Miss Agnes I went to some folks my own color on another farm 'joining to their farm. Of course I took my baby. I took Anna and I been living with Anna ever since. What I'd do now without her. (Anna is an Indian and very proud of being half Indian.) My husband done dead.

"I get eight dollars welfare help. And I do get some commodities. Anna does all right but she got hit on the shoulder and about lost use of her arm. One of the railroad hands up here got mad and hit her. I had doctors. They done it a little good. It's been hurt three years or more now.

"I wisht I knowd where to find a bed of mullen. Boil it down to a syrup and add some molasses, boil that down. It makes a good syrup for coughs and colds.

"I never went to white folks' church none hardly. Miss Agnes sent me along with her cook to my own color's church.

"My husband sure was good to me. We never had but one fight. Neither one whooped.

"This young generation is going backward. They tired of training. They don't want no advice. They don't want to work out no more. They don't know what they want. I think folks is trifling than they was when I come on. The times is all right and some of the people. I'm talking about mine and yo' color both."

Source: Arkansas Slave Narratives

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