Nicey Pugh

"I was bawn a slave, but I ain't neber been a slave," Nicey Pugh told her interviewer as she pulled up potato vines in her garden in Prichard, Alabama. She was one of eleven children of Hamp and Sarah West, all enslaved by a man named Jim Betts and his wife Martha, who had no children of their own. As a little girl Nicey swept and cleaned in the house; the enslaved had to be at the house by sunup to build fires and start the cooking. Her brother Joe and a man named Friday Davis hunted possums and caught fish by night. She remembered beer brewed at Christmas and three days of New Year's celebration.

She remembered being stopped by Klansmen while she and another little girl were bringing in the cows, and telling them they were up to no mischief. She said the enslaved were not taught to read because, the enslavers said, learning made them want to run away. She also described a Black boy who killed a white woman after she beat him; after his trial, a white crowd dragged him through town behind a horse, tortured him, and hanged him. She said death was a blessing to him.

Despite what she witnessed, Nicey looked back on the plantation with nostalgia, saying she missed the security of having someone to turn to in trouble, and describing the springhouse, the creek where the cows drank, dewberry picking, and singing in the moonlight. Her views reflect her own experience and are presented here as she gave them.