“I tole you I was a stole chile.  I never seen my own pa but a few times.  He lived on a joining farm.  Ma had a husband her master give her the first time they had been at a big log rolling and come up for dinner.  They put the planks out and the dinner on it.  They kept saying, ’Mack, shake hands with your papa.’  He was standing off to one side.  It was sorter shame.  They kept on.  I was little.  I went over there.  He shook hands with me.  I said, ‘Hi, papa!  Give me a nickel.’  He reached in his pocket and give me a nickel.  Then they stopped teasing me.  He went off on Alabama River eighteen miles from us to Caholba, Alabama.  I never seen him much more.  Ma had been dead then several years.

“Green, my brother, took me to Miss Mary Ann Roscoe when mama died.  She was my ma’s owner.  I stayed there till Green died.  A whole lot of boys was standing around and bet Green he couldn’t tote that barrel of molasses a certain piece.  They helped it up and was to help him put it down and give him five dollars.  That was late in the ebenin’.  He let the barrel down and a ball as big as a goose egg of blood come out of his mouth.  The next day he died.  Master got Dr. Blevins quick as he could ride there.  He was mad as he could be.  Dr. Blevins said it weighed eight hundred pounds.  It was a hogshead of molasses.  Green was much of a man.  He was a giant.  Dr. Blevins said they had killed a good man.  Green was good and so strong.  I never could forget it.  Green was my standby.

“The Yankees burnt Boss Henry’s father’s fine house, his gin, his grist mill, and fifty or sixty bales of cotton and took several fine horses.  They took him out in his shirt tail and beat him, and whooped his wife, trying to make them tell where the money was.  He told her to tell.  He had it buried in a pot in the garden.  They went and dug it up.  Forty thousand dollars in gold and silver.  Out they lit then.  I seen that.  He lived to be eighty and she lived to be seventy-eight years old.  He had owned seven or eight or ten miles of road land at Howell Crossroads.  Road land is like highway land, it is more costly.  He had Henry and Finas married and moved off.  Miss Melia was his daughter and her husband and the overseer was there but they couldn’t save the money.  I waited on Misa Melia when she got sick and died.  She was fine a woman as ever I seen.  Every colored person on the place knowed where the pot was buried.  Some of them planted it.  They wouldn’t tell.  We could hear the battles at Selma, Alabama.  It was a roar and like an earthquake.

“Freedom—­I was a little boy.  I cried to go with the bigger children.  They had to tote water.  One day I heard somebody crying over ’cross a ditch and fence covered with vines and small trees.  I heard, ’Do pray master.’  I run hid under the house.  I was snoring when they found me.  I heard somebody say, ‘Slave day is over.’  That is all I ever knowed about freedom.  The way I knowed, a Yankee.  We was in the road piling up sand and a lot of blue coats on horses was coming.  We got out of the road and went to tell our white folks.  They said, ’Get out of their way, they are Yankees.’