Ethel Daugherty told the fieldworker some unfortunate experiences of slavery that she had heard from older members of her family who had been slaves. She said her great-grandmother was a slave in Kentucky and was kept in the big house to help with the cooking. She received good food, but the slaves who worked in the fields were lined up and slopped like hogs. They had to eat from wooden troughs, into which all their food was poured.
At slave sales, women were forced to stand half-dressed for hours while a crowd of rough, drunken men bargained for them, frequently examining their teeth, heads, hands, and other body parts to determine their health and endurance. Sometimes owners of nearby plantations purchased children privately if they wanted them. If slave children attempted to return to their parents, usually they were severely beaten, and a closer watch was kept over them.
Four of Ethel’s great-grandmother’s children were sold, leaving her with only one son, her youngest. She lost all trace of her other children, partly because as soon as a child was sold, it took the name of the new master. Some children were sold several times, and each time their names were changed, making it extremely difficult to locate children who had been separated from their parents. Moreover, many children were shipped to different parts of the country and were not told who their parents were.
Ethel’s great-grandmother said that once a mother and son were separated for years, and when the boy grew up, he began keeping company with his mother. When he happened to mention to his mother a small, nearly invisible scar he had, she realized who he was and told him he was her son. Ethel said there were many marriages of relatives before the Civil War closed.
She said that one slaveholder kept many black women in his house, similar to Mormonism. Ethel thought interracial marriages, which she blamed on slavery, were sinful, and at the time of the interview she thought there still were too many interracial marriages. She attributed them to lack of self-control or the “devil turned loose.”
Ethel was sensitive about her family’s mixed blood. Her stepfather was a mixture of three races, his mother being Native American. She said that when he was angry, he thought he was all Indian. Ethel’s first husband’s name was Grady. When people remarked that the name sounded Irish, they were told that the name had been in the family since slave days. Her husband’s grandmother had been forced to live with her master, and Ethel claimed that as a result of that union, Mrs. Grady, Ethel’s mother-in-law, had very long hair. Ethel said she had never told anyone about this before, because Mrs. Grady always felt very bad about her origin. Ethel’s own eyes were blue, but she reasoned that was not her fault. She advised her own children to “stick to their color always.” Her maiden name was Taylor, and she said there were blacks named Taylor in Kentucky—all “descendants of the white family who bestowed their name on the colored children years ago.”
At the close of the war, her family was simply turned out to shift for themselves with no help from their master. Many of them came to Indiana, but Ethel was the only one to locate in Jefferson County.