“The niggers didn’t go to the church building; the preacher came and preached to them in their quarters.  He’d just say, ’Serve your masters.  Don’t steal your master’s turkey.  Don’t steal your master’s chickens.  Don’t steal your master’s hawgs.  Don’t steal your master’s meat.  Do whatsomeever your master tells you to do.’  Same old thing all the time.

“My father would have church in dwelling houses and they had to whisper.  My mother was dead and I would go with him.  Sometimes they would have church at his house.  That would be when they would want a real meetin’ with some real preachin’.  It would have to be durin’ the week nights.  You couldn’t tell the difference between Baptists and Methodists then.  They was all Christians.  I never saw them turn nobody down at the communion, but I have heard of it.  I never saw them turn no pots down neither; but I have heard of that.  They used to sing their songs in a whisper and pray in a whisper.  That was a prayer-meeting from house to house once or twice—­once or twice a week.

“Old Phipps whipped me once.  He aimed to kill me but I got loose.  He whipped me about a colored girl of his’n that he had by a colored woman.  Phipps went with a colored woman before he married his wife.  He had a girl named Martha Ann Phipps.  I beat Martha ’bout a pair of stockings.  My mistress bought me a nice pair of stockings from the store.  You see, they used to knit the stockings.  I wore the stockings once; then I washed them and put them on the fence to dry.  Martha stole them and put them on.  I beat her and took them off of her.  She ran and told her father and he ran me home.  He couldn’t catch me, and he told me he’d get me.  I didn’t run to my father.  I run to my mistress, and he knew he’d better not do nothin’ then.  He said, ’I’ll get you, you little old black some thin’.’  Only he didn’t say ‘somethin’.’  He didn’t get me then.

“But one day he caught me out by his house.  I had gone over that way on an errand I needn’t have done.  He had two girls hold me.  They was Angeline and Nancy.  They didn’t much want to hold me anyhow.  Some niggers would catch you and kill you for the white folks and then there was some that wouldn’t.  I got loose from them.  He tried to hold me hisself but he couldn’t.  I got away and went back to my old mistress and she wrote him a note never to lay his dirty hands on me again.  A little later her brother, Johnson Chatman, came there and ran him off the place.  My old mistress’ name was Susan Chatman before she married.  Then she married Toliver.  Then she married Reed.  She married Reed last—­after Toliver died.

“One old lady named Emily Moorehead runned in and held my mother once for Phipps to whip her.  And my mother was down with consumption too.  I aimed to git old Phipps for that.  But then I got religion and I couldn’t do it.  Religion makes you forgit a heap of things.