The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. NationNation, Carry Amelia
History
The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation
Nation, Carry Amelia
Nation, Carry Amelia, 1846-1911; Social reformers -- United States -- Biography; Temperance -- United States
My mother always left her small children in the care of the servants.
I was quite a little girl before I was allowed to eat at "white
folk's table." Once my mother had been away several days and came
home bringing a lot of company with her. I ran out when I saw the
carriages driving up, and cried: "Oh, ma, I am so glad to see you.
I don't mind sleeping with aunt Eliza, but I do hate to sleep with uncle
Josh," think I was quite dirty, and some of the colored servants snatched
me out of sight. Aunt Eliza was aunt Judy's half-sister, her father
was a white man. She was given to my father by my grandmother,
was very bright and handsome, and the mother of seventeen children.
My grandmother remembered aunt Eliza in her will, giving her some
linen sheets, furniture, and other things.
One of aunt Eliza's sons was named Newton. My father had a mill
and store up in Lincoln County, near Hustonville. Newton used to do
the hauling for my father with a large wagon and six-mule team. He
would often do the buying for the store and take measurements of
grain, and my father trusted him implicitly. Once a friend of my father
said to him, as Newton was passing along the street with his team:
"George, I'll give you seventeen hundred dollars for that negro." My
father said: "If you would fill that wagon-bed full of gold, you could
not get him." A few weeks after that Newton died. I remember seeing
my father in the room weeping, and remember the chorus of the song
the negroes sang on that occasion: "Let us sit down and chat with the
angels."
The husband of aunt Eliza was "uncle Josh," a small Guinea negro, as
black as coal and very peculiar. I always stood in awe of him, as all
the children did. I remember one expression of his was: "Get out of
the way, or I'll knock you into a cocked hat." The reason I had to
sleep with aunt Eliza, Betsy, my nurse, was only ten years older than
I was. Betsy was a girl given by my grandfather Campbell to my
mother when my father and mother were married. My mother was
a widow when she married my father. She had married Will Caldwell,
a son of Capt. Caldwell, who died in Sangamon County, Ill.,
he had freed his negroes and moved there from Kentucky. Will Caldwell
died after three years, leaving my mother with two children. Both of
them died at my grandfather Campbell's in Mercer county, Kentucky, before
she married my father.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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