John Cameron, Age 99 | 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.

John Cameron 
Former slave, Age: 99 

Timeperiod: 1936-38
Prop/pantomime options: Smartly dressed in a well-worn tattered hat and jacket. The man has pride, demonstrated in his manner.
Descriptors: WPA Interviewee

I’ve always lived right here in Hinds County. I’ve seen Jackson grow from de ground up. Marster was a rich man. He owned about a thousand and five hundred acres of land and around a hundred slaves. Marster’s big two-story white house set on top of a hill.

We’d go early to the fields an work in the cotton and corn. Each had a different job all the week. Ploughed, picked, planted. We’d get off from the fields early on Saturday evening’s across a valley from the Big House to the rows of slave cabins, wash up, sing, play the fiddle, and have a good time. Some went hunting or fishing. Folks these days don’t know about good eating. We had a great big garden for everybody and I ain’t never seen such ‘taters as that grew in that garden. They was so sweet the sugar burst right through the peel when you roasted them in the ashes.

When the war broke out Old Marster refugeed us to Virginia. I can’t say if the land was his, but he had a place for us to stay and eat. I don’t recollect when they told us we was freed but I do know Mr. Cameron promised to pay us for our work if we return to Mississippi with him.

After the War, it took a mighty long time to get things a-goin’ smooth. Folks and the Government, too, seem like they was all up-set and threatend like. For a long time it look like things going to bust loose again. Most everything was tore up and burned down to the ground. 

We work’d hard when we got back to the farm. When the time would come fer to pay, Mr. Cameron say he didn’t have it and kept putting us off, and we would work some more and get nothing for it. Old Missus would cry and she was good to us but they had no money.

I married when I was a young man. I was lucky enough to get the next best woman in the world. That gal was so good ‘til I had to court her almost two years before she’d say she’d have me. We had six children. Three of them’s still living. I educated them best I could even bought them a piano and give them music. One of them is in Memphis, another’s in Detroit, and the other’s in Chicago. I write to them, but don’ never hear back from them.

That seems to be the way of the world now. Everything and everybody is too fast and too frivolous these here times.