Ms. Grigsby's Home
Charity Grigsby, Livingston, Alabama
Charity Grigsby lives in a tumbledown shanty about nine miles from Livingston on the old Epes road. She was sewing on a quilt when I arrived; humming an old plantation song that ran:
Angels in de water, walkin’ by de light;
Po’ sinners stand in darkness an’ cannot see de light!A broad smile flowed across her black face as I entered the cabin. She placed her needle aside.
“Charity,” I said, “I want you to tell me about slavery times.”
She lowered her head in thought a moment, said: “Honey, what would I tell?”
“Just all you remember, Charity.“
And this is what she told: "Honey, I was borned Charity Grigsby, but I married Nelson Grigory; ain’t much distinguish in the names; but ‘twas a little.”
The Slave Narratives collection, spanning interviewers and interviewees across seventeen states, was a project organized by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration. These oral histories, narrated by over 2,300 former slaves, were collected between 1936-1938. The youngest of these former slaves would have been children at the end of the Civil War, and in their seventies and eighties by the time they were asked here to tell about their lives. The oldest have even murkier records of their places and times of birth — they might have been nearly 120, by the WPA interviewers’ estimates. But their memories equally illuminate these transcripts with recollections of the horrific, the joyful, and the mundane.