“My grandmother on my mother’s side was a Calvert too.  Her first name was Joanna.  I think my father’s parents got beat to death in slavery.  Grandfather on my mother’s side was tied to a stump and whipped to death.  He was double jointed and no two men could whip him.  They wanted to whip him because he wouldn’t work.  That was what they would whip any one for.  They would run off before they would work.  Stay in the woods all night.

“My Grandma Calvert was buried over here in Galloway on the Rock Island road on the John Eynes plantation.

“My folks’ masters were all right.  But them nigger drivers were bad, just like the county farm.  A man sitting in the house and putting you over a lot of men, you gwinter go up high as you want to.

“My father was a blacksmith and my mother was a weaver.  There was a lot of those slavery folks ’round the house, and they tell me they didn’t work them till they were twenty-one, they put them in the field when they were twenty-two.  If you didn’t work they would beat you to death.  My father killed his overseer and went on off to the War.

“The pateroles used to drive and whip them.  They would catch the slaves off without a pass and whip them and then make the boss pay for them when they took them back.  I never seen the pateroles but I have seen the Ku Klux and they were the same thing.

“The jayhawkers would catch you when the pateroles didn’t.  They would carry you to the pateroles and get pay for you, and the pateroles would turn you over to the owners.  You had to have a pass.  If you didn’t the pateroles would catch you and wear you out, keep you till the next morning, and then send you home by the jayhawkers.  They didn’t call them that though, they called them bushwhackers.

“The Ku Klux came after the War.  They was the same thing as the pateroles—­they come out from them.  I know where the Ku Klux home is over here on Eighteenth and Broadway.  That is where they broke up.  It ain’t never been open since. (Not correct—­ed.)

“I saw the Yankees come in the yard on the Webb place.  That was in the time of the War.  The old man got on his horse and flew.  The Yankees went in the smokehouse, broke it open, got all the meat they wanted.  They didn’t pay you nothing in slavery time.  But what meat the Yankees didn’t take for themselves, they give to the niggers.

“My folks never got anything for their work that I know of.  I heard my mother say that nobody got paid for their work.  I don’t know whether they had a chance to make anything on the side or not.

“The Yankees, when they come in the yard that morning, told my father he was free.  I remember that myself.  They come up riding horses and carryin’ long old guns with bayonets on them, and told him.  They rode all over the country from one place to another telling the niggers they were free.  Master didn’t get a chance to tell us because he left when he saw them comin’.