Fig. 7. Top: The Bloodhound Business (Library of Congress)
Bottom: Slave hiding in a tree, trapped by armed whites on horseback; dogs surrounding tree (Library of Congress)
A white friend who lived in a predominately black neighborhood once asked me, “Why are black people so afraid of dogs?” He had fairly large but gentle dogs that often sent black people running in terror. Dogs were often bred in the South to literally eat people. These were called “nigger dogs,” and they were used by plantation patrollers to keep slaves frightened to leave the plantation.
“Aunt Cheyney was jus’ out of bed with a sucklin’ baby one time, and she run away. Some say that was nother baby of massa’s breedin’. She dont’ come to the house to nurse her baby, so they misses her and old Solomon gits the nigger hounds and takes her trail. They gits near her and she grabs a limb and tries to heist herself in a tree, but them dogs grab her and pull her down. The men hollers them onto her, and the dogs tore her naked and et the breasts plumb off her body. She got well and lived to be a old woman, but nother woman has to suck her baby and she ain’t got no sign of breasts no more.”[1]
Mary Reynolds
“They’d send for a man that had hounds to track you, if you run away. They’d run you and bay you, and a white man would ride up there and say, “If you hit one of them hounds, I’ll blow your brains out. ” He’d say “your damn brains. ” Them hounds would worry you and bite you and have you bloody as a beef, but you dassen’t to hit one of them. They would tell you to stand still and put your hands over your privates. I don’t guess they’d have killed you, but you believe they would. They wouldn’t try to keep the hounds off you; They would set them on you to see them bite you. Five or six or seven hounds bitin’ you oa every side, and a man settin’ on a horse holding a doubled shotgun on you.”[2]
Henry Waldon
“My mother was smart and apt, and Old Mis’ took her for a house servant. One day, she got mad about something what happened at the big house, so she runned off. When she couldn’t be found, they hunted her with dogs. Them dogs went right straight to the ditch where my mother was hid, and before the men could get to them, they had torn most of her clothes off her and had bitten her all over. When they brought her in, she was a sight to see all covered with blood and dirt. Old Mis’ flew into a rage, and she told those men not to never again hunt nobody on her place with dogs.”[3]
Evie Herrin
[1] Mellon, Bullwhip Days.
[2] Henry Waldon,in Mellon, Bullwhip Days, 300.
[3] Evie Herrin,in Mellon, Bullwhip Days, 3.