As to her age, she said she was "a little girl on the floor whan the
stars fell." I looked this up at the public library and found that
falling stars or showers of meteors occur in cycles of thirty-three
years. One such display was recorded in 1833 and another in 1866. So if
Rachel Bradley is really 107 years old, she was born in 1830. It is a
question in my mind whether or not she could have remembered falling
stars at the age of three, but on the other hand if she was "a little
girl on the floor" in 1866 she would be only somewhere between
seventy-five and eighty years of age.
Her master and mistress were Mitchell and Elizabeth Simmons and they had
two sons and two daughters. They lived on a plantation about twelve
miles from Farmersville, Louisiana.
Rachel was a house girl and her mother was the cook. Besides doing house
work, she was nursemaid and as she grew older did her mistress' sewing
and could also weave and knit. From the way she smiled and rolled her
eyes I could see that this was the happiest time of her life. "My white
folks was so good to me. I sat right down to the same table after they
was thru."
While a child in the home of her white folks she played with her
mistress' children. In her own words "My mistress give us a task to do
and when we got it done, we went to our playhouse in the yard."
When the war came along, her master was too old to go but his two sons
went and both lived through the war.
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