Martha Bradley

Martha Bradley, known as "Aunt Martha," said she was 100 years old when she was interviewed in Montgomery, Alabama. She was enslaved by Dr. Lucas of the Mount Meigs neighborhood, the family General Lafayette visited in 1825. She always worked in the fields, hauling heavy logs with straps on her arms. One rainy morning, when the overseer came to drag her out and started whipping her, she jumped on him, hitting and kicking until he let go. Another time, when an overseer said something improper to her in the field, she knocked him down with her hoe and ran for the bushes. Dr. Lucas came and began to whip her, but stopped when she told him what the overseer had said.

She remembered Christmas and July dinners spread on the ground with all the lemonade they could drink, and telling the cook that the knife "just flew around by itself" and cut the cake. They picked cotton by candlelight in season and quilted together in winter. She said a man on the neighboring plantation shot and killed an overseer and fled. When he was caught, the local magistrate refused to take part, and the man was burned alive. Martha said she saw his body afterward.

In old age she said times were hard, and that if someone gave her a nickel or dime for food, it all had to be written down in a book.