“Susan Reed, my old mistress, bought my father and paid fifteen hundred dollars for him and she hadn’t never seen ’im.  Advertising.  He had run away so much that they had to advertise and sell ’im.  He never would run away from Miss Susan.  She was good to him till she got that old nigger beater Phipps.  Her husband, Reed, was called a nigger spoiler.  My father was an old man when Phipps was on overseer and wasn’t able to fight much then.

“Phipps sure was a bad man.  He wasn’t so bad neither; but the niggers was scared of him.  You know in slave times, sometimes when a master would git too bad, the niggers would kill him—­tote him off out in the woods somewheres and git rid of him.  Two or three of them would git together and scheme it out, and then two or three of them would git him way out and kill ‘im.  But they didn’t nobody ever pull nothin’ like that on Phipps.  They was scared of him.

“One time I saw the Yankees a long way off.  They had on blue uniforms and was on coal black horses.  I hollered out, ‘Oh, I see somethin’.’  My mistress said, ‘What?’ I told her, and she said, ‘Them’s the Yankees.’  She went on in the house and I went with her.  She sacked up all the valuables in the house.  She said, ‘Here,’ and she threw a sack of silver on me that was so heavy that I went right on down to the ground.  Then she took hold of it and holp me up and holp me carry it out.  I carried it out and hid it.  She had three buckskin sacks—­all full of silver.  That wasn’t now; that was in slavery times.  During the War, Jeff Davis gave out Confederate money.  It died out on the folks’ hands.  About twelve hundred dollars of it died out on my father’s hands.  But there wasn’t nothin’ but gold and silver in them sacks.

“I heard them tell the slaves they were free.  A man named Captain Barkus who had his arm off at the elbow called for the three near-by plantations to meet at our place.  Then he got up on a platform with another man beside him and declared peace and freedom.  He p’inted to a colored man and yelled, ‘You’re free as I am.’  Old colored folks, old as I am now, that was on sticks, throwed them sticks away and shouted.

“Right after freedom I stayed with that white woman I told you about.  I was with her about four years.  I worked for twelve dollars a month and my food and clothes.  Then I figured that twelve dollars wasn’t enough and I went to work in the field.  It was a mighty nice woman.  Never hit me in her life.  I never have been whipped by a white woman.  She was good to me till she died.  She died after I had my second child—­a girl child.