Nancy Whallen was living at 924 Pearl Street in New Albany with her daughter when interviewed. She was around eighty years old, but she did not know her exact age. The fieldworker said Nancy was hard to talk to because her memory was failing and she could not hear very well.
Nancy was born and raised in Hart County, Kentucky, where she lived a typical life of a rural black person during the Civil War and just afterwards. She remembered soldiers coming through the farm and asking for food. Some of them camped on the farm and talked to her and teased her. She told about one big slave named Scott who could outwork all the others on the farm. He would hang his hat and shirt on a tree limb and work all day long in the blazing sun on the hottest day.
She said that blacks used to have revivals in the woods. They would sometimes build a sort of brush shelter with leaves for a roof, and services were held there. Preaching and shouting sometimes lasted all day Sunday. Blacks came from miles around when they could get away. The revivals usually were held away from the whites, who seldom, if ever, saw these gatherings.
Nancy remembered a big eclipse of the sun, or the “day of dark,” as she called it. The chickens all went to roost, and all the slaves thought the end of the world had come. The cattle lowed, and everyone was scared to death.
Nancy said she was about five years old when freedom was declared. She stayed in Kentucky after the war, coming to Indiana when she was a young woman.