“I heard the woman I lived with, a woman named Diana Wagner, tell how her mistress said, ’Come on, Diana, I want you to go with me down the road a piece.’  And she went with her and they got to a place where there was a whole lot of people.  They were putting them up on a block and selling them just like cattle.  She had a little nursing baby at home and she broke away from her mistress and them and said, ’I can’t go off and leave my baby.’  And they had to git some men and throw her down and hold her to keep her from goin’ back to the house.  They sold her away from her baby boy.  They didn’t let her go back to see him again.  But she heard from him after he became a young man.  Some one of her friends that knowed her and knowed she was sold away from her baby met up with this boy and got to questioning him about his mother.  The white folks had told him his mother’s name and all.  He told them and they said, ’Boy, I know your mother.  She’s down in Newport.’  And he said, ’Gimme her address and I’ll write to her and see if I can hear from her.’  And he wrote.  And the white people said they heard such a hollering and shouting goin’ on they said, ‘What’s the matter with Diana?’ And they came over to see what was happening.  And she said, ’I got a letter from my boy that was sold from me when he was a nursing baby.’  She had me write a letter to him.  I did all her writing for her and he came to see her.  I didn’t get to see him.  I was away when he come.  She said she was willing to die that the Lord let her live to see her baby again and had taken care of him through all these years.

“My father’s name was Peter Warren and my mother was named Adelaide Warren.  Before she was married she went by her owner’s name, Hickman.  My daddy belonged to the Phillips but he didn’t go in their name.  He went in the Warren’s name.  He did that because he liked them.  Phillips was his real father, but he sold him to the Warrens and he took their name and kept it.  They treated him nice and he just stayed on in their name.  He didn’t marry till after both of them were free.  He met her somewheres away from the Hickman’s.  They married in Alabama.

“Mama was born and mostly reared in Virginia and then come to Alabama.  That’s where I was born, in Alabama.  And they left there and came here.  I was four years old when they come here.

“I never did hear what my father did in slavery time.  He was a twin.  The most he took notice of he said was his brother and him settin’ on an old three-legged stool.  And his mother had left some soft soap on the fire.  His brother saw that the pot was goin’ to turn over and he jumped up.  My father tried to get up too but the stool turned over and caught him, caught his little dress and held him and the hot soap ran over his dress and on to his bare skin.  It left a big burn on his side long as he lived.  His mother was there close to the house because she knowed the soap was on and those two little boys were in there.  She