Doc | Fictional account based on WPA Slave Narratives (Mississippi)

As a MDAH volunteer, one of my assignments was to write scripts for potential historical re-enactors based on historic documents.

Doc
Male Slave, fictional

Time period: Pre-1865
Prop/pantomime options: Chopping, sawing, or piling wood; with partner** 
Descriptors: Big, strong, in his 20s or 30s

Story told I was sold to pay a bar debt o’ Marster John Bussey. He was a regular drunkard, with a big o’ farm off the Tombigbee River. He was a doctor, so I come to be known as “Doc.” Dont know my birthdate or the name my mammy gave me. I remember my sister and brother was fine field hands, and the Marster weren’t going to get rid of them. I was still runnin’ round in homespun, digging in the dirt and throwin’ rocks, not worth much than few hundred greenbacks when he sold me away.

At first, I was Marster’s pet nigger boy. I slept on the floor on a pallet by ol’ Miss and Marse. Was my job to roll over and blow dem ashes and make the fire burn. Everybody in the quarters woke up at four o’clock by a bugle blowed mostly by a nigger, and was at their work by sun-up. I didn’t know what a shoe was made for ‘til I was twelve or thirteen. We’d go rabbit huntin’ barefoot in the snow. Ole Gert who does the cookin’ around the place fried what we killed, with hot pone and baked taters. Ate some coon sometimes too.

Marse hired me out just like a mule when I got big. Have to have a pass to leave the plantation or they send someone to come lookin’ for you. Children sing the song:

Run nigger run, de patterrollers ketch you --  
Run nigger run, fer hits almos’ day,
De nigger run; de nigger flew; de nigger los’
His big ole shoe. 

I saw what those paddyrollers done to those niggers they caught. Whupped and chained too. They whupped til the blood come. Then they washed off with salt and the nigger put right back in the field. I cut cordwood for Boss -- he don’t own me, so I don’t call him Marster. Two cords a day. Boss pays Marse a dollar a cord. 

Day before last Christmas Marse come up to me and say, ‘You’re a good ole buck and I’m gonna get you a wife this year to raise little niggers; then I won’t have to buy them.’ Her name is Ruby. Marse bought her so that our babies can be his. She had already two kids when Marse put us together. She cry and cry at night missin’ them children til she start to get big with our own. She help out Ole Gert in the Big House, but she sleep in the quarters with me. We ain’t had no wedding, but I built the bed we sleep in.

I ain’t got no learnin’. That is no book learnin’. No teachers like that, but Miss sure want us niggers taught to be Christians. We go to the white folks’ church and set in the gallery. We’re told if caught with a book, we’d be sold. Might not like where I am, but I know it and I don’t know what the next Hell might look like, so I stay. Preacher say obey Marse, be good, work hard and Heaven will be mine. 

He don’t say if I’ll be free in Heaven. 

**If larger performance space is available, there could be two working lumber. The other man is there as ‘witness/audience’: remembering and smiling when Doc talks about hunting rabbits or accompanying him in the song. Showing deference when Ruby is mentioned. Grimacing when Doc talks about education.