When interviewed, Patsy Jane Bland was nearly 107 years old and had outlived most of her seven children. According to her obituary in the Terre Haute Tribune (June 29, 1938), she died at the age of 107 in Terre Haute and was buried in Rockport, Indiana. At the time of the interview, she was living at 1519 North 27th Street in Terre Haute with her next-to-youngest son, Johnny Wilson, who himself was up in years. Patsy said her oldest daughter lived in Dayton, Ohio, and “looks as old as her ma.” She came to Terre Haute in 1919 because some of her relatives already were living there. She still cooked and kept house, but she told the fieldworker that “I ain’t seen a well day for three years.” Nevertheless, with the help of a hickory cane, which she called her “wooden leg,” she got around fairly well. She was living on benefits from her late husband, a Civil War veteran.
Patsy said her religion was deep, and whenever she could she attended a Baptist church near her home. She was preparing to celebrate her birthday at home on August 8, 1937, and said she hoped everyone she knew would send her a birthday present. Sitting in an old armchair, smoking a pipe, and looking out the door, she reflected on her past. On the south side of her house was a patch of tobacco raised by her son and her, but Patsy said she was “too delicate to smoke that old Tennessee red now.” Instead, she smoked “sack tobacco” in her corncob pipe, claiming she could not do without it.
One of a large family, Patsy was born on August 8, 1830, in a cabin on the plantation of William Kettering in Shelby County, Kentucky. She was sold twice, first to Charles Morgan and then to John Boyle. Patsy recalled that as a child she was a “reggler limb” [regular lamb], though there was nothing she would not do to have fun, and “many was the lickin’” she got. Although she claimed that at her age her mind did not “work in a straight line,” the interviewer reported that “her mental faculties are in excellent condition” and she remembered plantation life well. She was one of only a few people then living who could recall so many years before the Civil War.
Along with her owner’s daughter, she learned to “spell out her letters” until the white child’s mother decided that Patsy was getting too smart, so her education ended until she was married to her fourth and last husband, who taught her some more. Patsy said she could read “for a long time by spelling it out,” but recently her eyes “ain’t so good.”
On the plantation, Patsy did all kinds of work, even plowing: “I worked like a man. I’ve spun flax, cut wool off sheep, washed it, carded and spun it for stockings and underwear. I never wore anything but wool underwear in the wintertime, and none of my younguns did either. I used to sit and knit wool up for their stockings. Indeed, I’ve worked hard.” Patsy also recalled that her clothes were made of tow. Besides carding and spinning, Patsy helped raise tobacco—two crops some years, when she would cut the leaves off the old stalks to let another crop grow. She said she had always worked and would not have had it any other way.
Patsy remembered sleeping on a straw pallet on the floor and in a trundle bed shoved back under the big bed. She remembered baking corn dodger on a hot brick fireplace; hanging the kettle over the crane to cook “pawn hoss,” which was made from meal and bacon; roasting sweet potatoes and sweet corn; and baking ash cake in hot ashes. She said blacks sang jubilee songs and even made up songs down on the old plantation in Kentucky.
Patsy also recalled observing the wedding of the master’s daughter in the big house. The wedding preparations began days in advance with the saving of chickens, eggs, and butter. She said the preparations included the liveliest egg-beating, butter-creaming, raisin-stoning, sugar-pounding, cake-icing, coconut-scraping and -grating, jelly-straining, silver-cleaning, egg-frothing, floor-rubbing, pastry-making, ruffle-crimping, tarlatan-smoothing, and trunk-moving time you ever saw. All the slaves turned out to help. She also recalled peeping at the bride with her long veil and train and at the guests. The night before the wedding, the slaves all gathered in their quarters to sing, over and over, every song they knew to celebrate the bride’s marriage and her departure to Virginia. Patsy also remembered that the young bride died soon after the big wedding and that she was buried in her bridal dress. She recalled, too, the deaths of some other whites and the burial of some of her black friends.
Already the mother of four when the Civil War began, Patsy remembered seeing soldiers, and “because they were scared,” the slaves ran from them and hid out. She remembered the day all the blacks on her plantation were set free. There was shouting and crying; there was joy and sadness. She said many blacks did not want to leave the plantation to go out into a world of which they knew nothing. Patsy, though, gathered her four children around her and with her husband, who was named Wilson, left the plantation. When the fieldworker asked if she was happier free, Patsy looked off into the distance and said, “Free? Is anybody ever free? Ain’t everybody you know a slave to someone or something or other?”