The following excerpt is from an oral history interview with Mrs. Josie Jordan, conducted as part of the Federal Writer's Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s. Jordan was seventy-five years old at the time. The interview took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The WPA interviews of Jordan and thousands of other former slaves were assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves.The Library of Congress has placed 2,300 of these first-person accounts online, in the "Slave Narratives" portion of its American Memory Web site.
. . . I remember Mammy told me about one master who almost starved his slaves. Mighty stingy, I reckon he was. Some of them slaves was so poorly thin they ribs would kinda rustle against each other like corn stalks a-drying in the hot winds. But they gets even one hog-killing time, and it was funny, too, Mammy said.
They was seven hogs, fat and ready for fall hog-killing time. Just the day before Old Master told off they was to be killed, something happened to all them porkers. One of the field boys found them and come a-telling the master: "The hogs is all died, now they won't be any meats for the winter." When the master gets to where at the hogs is laying, they's a lot of Negroes standing round looking sorrow-eyed at the wasted meat. The master asks: "What's the illness with 'em?"
"Malitis," they tells him, and they acts like they don't want to touch the hogs. Master says to dress them anyway for they ain't no more meat on the place. He says to keep all the meat for the slave families, but that's because he's afraid to eat it hisself account of the hogs' got malitis.
"Don't you all know what is malitis?" Mammy would ask the children when she was telling of the seven fat hogs and 70 lean slaves. And she would laugh, remembering how they fooled Old Master so's to get all them good meats.
"One of the strongest Negroes got up early in the morning," Mammy would explain, "long 'fore the rising horn called the slaves from their cabins. He skitted to the hog pen with a heavy mallet in his hand. When he tapped Mister Hog 'tween the eyes with that mallet, malitis set in mighty quick, but it was a uncommon disease, even with hungry Negroes around all the time."
SOURCE: The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume Two, Third Edition, pg. 259.