“When New Year day come the white man locked me up in a room in his house and I stayed in there two days.  They brought me plenty to eat.  I slept in there with their children.  Mr. Cargo never come after me till March.  He didn’t see me when he come.  It started in raining and cold and the roads was bad.  When he come in March I seen him.  I knowed him.  I lay down and covered up in leaves.  They was deep.  I had been in the woods getting sweet-gum when I seen him.  He scared me.  He never seen me.  This white man bound me to his wife’s friend for a year to keep Mr. Cargo from getting me back.  The woman at the house and Mr. Cargo had war nearly about me.  I missed my whoopings.  I never got none that whole year.  It was Mrs. Brown, twenty miles from Dardanelle, they bound me over to.  I never got no more than the common run of Negro children but they wasn’t mean to me.

“When I was at Cargo’s, he wouldn’t buy me shoes.  Miss Betty would have but in them days the man was head of his house.  Miss Betty made me moccasins to wear out in the snow—­made them out of old rags and pieces of his pants.  I had risings on my feet and my feet frostbite till they was solid sores.  He would take his knife and stob my risings to see the matter pop way out.  The ice cut my feet.  He cut my foot on the side with a cowhide nearly to the bone.  Miss Betty catch him outer sight would doctor my feet.  Seem like she was scared of him.  He wasn’t none too good to her.

“He told his wife the Freemens Bureau said turn that Negro girl loose.  She didn’t want me to leave her.  He despised nasty Negroes he said.  One of them fellows what come for me had been to Cargo’s and seen me.  He was the Negro man come to show Patsy’s husband and his share cropper where I was at.  He whooped me twice before them deer hunters.  They visited him every spring and fall hunting deer but they reported him to the Freemens Bureau.  They knowed he was showing off.  He overtook me on a horse one day four or five years after I left there.  I was on my way from school.  I was grown.  He wanted me to come back live with them.  Said Miss Betty wanted to see me so bad.  I was so scared I lied to him and said yes to all he said.  He wanted to come get me a certain day.  I lied about where I lived.  He went to the wrong place to get me I heard.  I was afraid to meet him on the road.  He died at Dardanelle before I come way from there.

“After I got grown I hired out cooking at $1.25 a week and then $1.50 a week.  When I was a girl I ploughed some.  I worked in the field a mighty little but I have done a mountain of washing and ironing in my life.  I can’t tell you to save my life what a hard time I had when I was growing up.  My daughter is a blessing to me.  She is so good to me.

“I never knowed nor seen the Ku Klux.  The Bushwhackers was awful after the war.  They went about stealing and they wouldn’t work.