“I’ll tell you what was done in slave time.  They’d sing and pray.  The white folks would take you to the creek and baptize you like anybody else.

“Sometimes the slaves would be off and have prayer meetings of their own—­nothing but colored people there.  They soon got out uh that.

“Sometimes they would turn a tub or pot down.  That would be when they were making a lot of fuss and didn’t want to bother nobody.  The white people wouldn’t be against the meeting.  But they wouldn’t want to be disturbed.  If you wanted to sing at night and didn’t want nobody to hear it, you could just take an old wash pot and turn it down—­leave a little space for the air, and nobody could hear it.

Amusement

“The grown folks didn’t have much amusement in slavery times.  They had banjo, fiddle, melodian, and things like that.  There wasn’t no baseball in those days.  I never seed none.  They could dance all they wanted to their way.  They danced the dotillions and the waltzes and breakdown steps, all such as that.  Pick banjo!  U-umph!  They would give corn huskins; they would go and shuck corn and shuck so much.  Get through shucking, they would give you dinner.  Sometimes big rich white people would give dances out in the yard and look at their way of dancing, and doing.  Violin players would be colored.

“Have cotton picking too sometimes at night, moonshiney nights.  That’s when they’d give the cotton pickings.  Say you didn’t have many hands, then they’d go and send you one hand from this place and one from that place.  And so on.  Your friends would do all that for you.  Between ’em they’d git up a big bunch of hands.  Then they’d give the cotton picking, and git your field clared up.  They’d give you something to eat and whiskey to drink.

How Freedom Came

“Notice was given to my father that he was free.  White people in that country give it to him.  I don’t know what they said to my father.  Then the last gun was fired.  I don’t know where peace was declared.  Notice come how that everybody was free.  Told my daddy, ’You’re just as free as I am.’  Some went back to their daddy’s name.  Some went back to their master’s name.  My daddy went back to his old master’s name.

Right after the War

“First year after the war, they planted a crop.  Didn’t raise no cotton during the war, from the time the war started till it ended, they didn’t raise no cotton.

“After the war, they give the colored people corn and cotton, one-third and one-fourth.  They would haul a load of it up during the war I mean, during the time before the war, and give it to the colored people.

“They had two crops.  No cotton in the time of the war, nothing but corn and peas and potatoes and so on.  All that went to the white people.  But they divided it.  They give all so much round.  Had a bin for the white and a bin for the colored.  The next year they commenced with the third and fourth business—­third of the cotton and fourth of the corn.  You could have all the peanuts you wanted.  You could sell your corn but they would only give you fifty cents for it—­fifty cents a bushel.