White Farmer Diaries

I remember from when I was a little boy when my father would always tell me about other people and their lives. I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed listening to these stories. Father once told me he had a friend name Bronté Charleston. This man was a man in his mid thirties that worked for a white farmer. I asked father how much he was getting payed for working for this white farmer. He said he was getting paid to go to the new world. I did not understand what that meant, so father explained it to me. He said that they were called indentured servants, and that they worked for four to seven years. When their term was up, the farmer that the servant was working for would pay the for the servant's trip to the new world. I had to ask father what that meant, and he told me that the new world was a place in a different country.
They called this slavery. He explained to me that slavery was when us dark-skin folks were being owned by white farmers in America. The farmers made people like us work for long, hard hours in cotton and tobacco fields. He said if they did not do what the farmers told them to do, the could get whipped. I have been hit by a switch before, and I myself did not like the feeling of is on my backside. I could only imagine what pain my people would go through if they got whipped. And my dad told me that the whippings they received were much worse than the measly little ones that I have received. The were whipped with bull whips and cat o' nine tails across the back till they bleed. And they weren't made to bend over a chair like I was. Instead the were usually tied to a tree or a fence post. They usually lived in little sheds the farmers had with about twelve people, getting served little food. They were only aloud one fifteen minute break during a day. Otherwise they could not rest until they hit the hay (quite literally). I am greatful that a live how I do