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Slave children were often given minimal amounts of clothing. On some farms, they went entirely naked. Mattie Curtis, who was enslaved in North Carolina, remembered in an interview years later:
"I went as naked as Yo' han' till I was fourteen years old. I was naked like that when my nature come to me. Marse Whitfield aren't carin', but atter dat mammy tol' him dat I had ter have clothes."
As Mattie's memory suggests, changes in the dress of slaves often occurred at the onset of adolescence. For boys, this usually meant trading in long dress-like shirts, similar to those worn by the children pictured above, for pants. Fountain Hughes, formerly a slave, recalled:
" ... you wore a dress like a woman till I was ... ten, twelve, thirteen years old."
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