A long time after peace, one evening mother heard a tapping at the door.  When she went, there was her old master, James Moore.  “Angeline,” he said, “you remember me, don’t you?” Course she did.  Then he told her he was hungry and homeless.  A man hiding out.  The Yankees had taken everything he had.  Mother took him in and fed him for two or three days till he was rested.  The other thing clear to my memory is when my uncle Tom was sold.  Another day when mother was washing at the wellhouse and I was playing around, two white men came with a big, broad-shouldered colored man between them.  Mother put her arms around him and cried and kissed him goodbye.  A long time after, I was watching one of my brothers walk down a path.  I told mother that his shoulders and body look like that man she kissed and cried over.  “Why honey,” she says to me, “can you remember that?” Then she told me about my uncle Tom being sold away.

So you see, Miss, it’s a good thing you are more interested in what I know since slave days.  I’ll go on now.

The first thing after freedom my mother kept boarders and done fine laundry work.  She boarded officers of the colored Union soldiers; she washed for the officers’ families at the Arsenal.  Sometimes they come and ask her to cook them something special good to eat.  Both my father and mother were fine cooks.  That’s when we lived at Third and Cumberland.  I stayed home till I was sixteen and helped with the cooking and washing and ironing.  I never worked in a cottonfield.  The boys did.  All us girls were reared about the house.  We were trained to be lady’s maids and houseworkers.  I married when I was sixteen.  That husband died four years later, and the next year I married this man, Joel Randolph White.  Married him in March, 1879.  In those days you could put a house on leased ground.  Could lease it for five years at a time.  My father put up a house on Tenth and Scott.  Old man Haynie owned the land and let us live in the house for $25.00 a year until father’s money was all gone; then we had to move out.  The first home my father really owned was at 1220 Spring street, what is now.  Course then, it was away out in the country.  A white lawyer from the north—­B.F.  Rice was his name—­got my brother Jimmie to work in his office.  Jimmie had been in school most all his life and was right educated for colored boy then.  Mr. Rice finally asked him how would he like to study law.  So he did; but all the time he wanted to be a preacher.  Mr. Rice tell Jimmie to go on studying law.  It is a good education; it would help him to be a preacher.  Mr. Rice tell my father he can own his own home by law.  So he make out the papers and take care of everything so some persons can’t take it away.  All that time my family was working for Mr. Rice and finally got the home paid for, all but the last payment, and Mr. Rice said Jimmie’s services was worth that.  So we had a nice home all paid for at last.  We lived there till father died in 1879, and about ten years more.  Then sold it.