[HW:  Free Colonies]

“I was born in Nansemond County, Virginia on my father’s place near the center of the County.  I was born free.  We were members of the colonies.  You know there were what is known as Free Colonies.  They were Negroes that had always been free.  The first landing of the Negroes in America, they claimed, formed a colony.  The Negro men who came over, it is said, could buy their freedom and a number of them did.

“But I didn’t become free that way.  My ancestors were a white man and an Indian woman.  He was my great-grandfather.  None of my family have been slaves as far back as I know.

“There was one set of white people in Virginia called Quakers.  Their rule was to free all slaves at the age of twenty-one.  So we got some free Negroes under that rule.  My mother who was a Negro woman was freed under this rule.  My father was always free.

“My grandmother on my father’s side owned slaves.  The law was that colored people could own slaves but they were not allowed to buy them.  I don’t know how many slaves my grandmother owned.  I didn’t know they were slaves until the War was over.  I saw the colored people living in the little houses on the place but I didn’t know they was slaves.

“One morning my grandmother went down to the quarters and when she came back she said to my aunt, ‘Well, the slaves left last night.’  And that was the first I knew of their being slaves.

“My father’s name was Frank Boone.  I was named for him.  My mother’s name was Phoebe Chalk.  I don’t know who her mother and father were.  She said that her mother died when she was a child.  She was raised by Quaker people.  I presume that her mother belonged to these Quaker people.

“On our place no grown person was ever whipped.  They was just like one family.  They called grandmother’s house the big house.  They farmed.  They didn’t raise cotton though.  They raised corn, peas, wheat, potatoes, and all things for the table.  Hogs, cows, and all such like was raised.  I never saw a pound of meat or a peck of flour or a bucket of lard or anything like that bought.  We rendered our own lard, pickled our own fish, smoked our own meat and cured it, ground our own sausage, ground our own flour and meal from our own wheat and corn we raised on our place, spun and wove our own cloth.  The first suit of clothes I ever wore, my mother spun the cotton and wool, wove the cloth and made the clothes.  It was a mixed steel gray suit.  She dyed the thread so as to get the pattern.  One loom carried the black thread through and the other carried the white thread to weave the cloth into the mixed pattern.

“I don’t know how large our place was.  Maybe it was about a hundred acres.  Every one that married out of the family had a home.  They called it a free Negro colony.  Nothing but Negroes in it.

“My father volunteered and went to the army in 1862.  He served with the Yankees.  You know Negroes didn’t fight in the Confederate armies.  They was in the armies, but they were servants.  My father enrolled as a soldier.  I think it was in Company F. I don’t know the regiment or the division.  He was a sergeant last time I saw him.  I remember that well, I remember the stripes on his arm.  He was mustered out in Galveston, Texas, in 1865.