them.  They said they kept them tied down in that place.  Five hundred lashes and shot ’em up in jail was light punishment.  They said it was light brushing.  I lived up in the Piney Woods.  It was big rich bottom plantations from Weldon Bridge to Halifax down on the river.  They was rough on ’em, killed some.  No, I never seen Jim Johnson to know him.  He lived at Edenton, North Carolina.  I recollect mighty well the day he died we had a big storm, blowed down big trees.  That jail was standing when I come to Arkansas forty-seven years ago.  It was a ‘Bill brew’ (stocks) they put men in when they put them in jail.  Turned male hog in there for a blind.

“Part of Jim Johnson’s overseers was black and part white.  Hatterway was white and Nat was black.  They was the head overseers and both bad men.  I could hear them crying way to our place early in the morning and at night.

“Lansing Kahart owned grandma when I was a little boy.

“They took hands in droves one hundred fifty miles to Richmond to sell them.  Richmond and New Orleans was the two big selling blocks.  My uncle was sold at Richmond and when I come to Arkansas he was living at Helena.  I never did get to see him but I seen his two boys.  They live down there now.  I don’t know how my uncle got to Helena but he was turned loose down in this country at ’mancipation.  They told me that.

“When a man wanted a woman he went and axed the master for her and took her on.  That is about all there was to it.  No use to want one of the women on Jim Johnson’s, Debrose, Tillery farms.  They kept them on their own and didn’t want visitors.  They was big farms.  Kershy had a big farm.

“The Yankees never went to my master’s house a time.  The black folks knowd the Yankees was after freedom.  They had a song no niggers ever made up, ‘I wanter be free.’

“My master was too old to go to war but Bill went.  I think it was better times in slavery than now but I’m not in favor of bringing it back on account of the cruelty and dividing up families.  My master was good to us.  He was proud of us.  We fared fine.  He had a five or six horse farm.  His land wasn’t strong but we worked and had plenty.  Mother cooked for white and colored.  We had what they et ’cepting when company come.  When they left we got scraps.  Then when Christmas come we had cakes and pies stacked up setting about for us to cut.  They cut down through a whole stack of pies.  Cut them in halves and pass them among us.  We got hunks of cake a piece.  We had plain eating er plenty all the time.  You see I’m a big man.  I wasn’t starved out till I was about grown, after the War was over.  Times really was hard.  Hard, hard times come on us all.

“Mama got one whooping in her life.  I seen that.  Jason Williams whipped only two grown folks in my life, mama and my brother.  Mama sassed her mistress or that what they called it then.  Since then I’ve heard worse jawing not called sassing, call it arguing now.  Sassing was a bad trait in them days.  Brother was whooped in the field.  He was seven years older than me.  I didn’t see none of that.  They talked a right smart about it.