Miss Agnes take them back and show us off.  They say, ’Where the little black chile?’ They’d try to get me to come go live wid them.  They say they be good to me.  I’d tell ’em, ‘No, I stay here.’  It was good a home as I wanted.  We slept on the front gallery till Lucy come on, then we had sheep skin pallets.  She got the big chair.  She put us out there because it was cool.

“I left Miss Agnes when I got to be my own woman.  Didn’t nobody toll me off.  I knowed I ought to go to my own race of people.  They come after me once.  Then they sent the baby boy after me what I had nursed.  I wanted to go but I never went.  Miss Lucy and Miss Mary both in college.  It was lonesome for me.  I wanted to go to my color.  I jus’ picked up and walked on off.

“My girl is half Indian.  I’m fifteen years older than my girl.  Then I married Wesley Perkins, my husband.  He is black fur a fact.  He died last fall.  I married at my husband’s brother’s by a colored preacher.  Tom Screws was his name.  He was a Baptist preacher.

“I never went to school a day in my life.  I can’t read.  I can count money.  Seem lack it jus’ come natural.  I never learned it at no one time.  It jus’ come to me.

“In warm weather I slept on the gallery and in cold weather I slept by the fire.  I made down my own bed.  I cleaned the house.  I took the cows off to the pasture.  I nursed the babies, washed and dried the dishes.  I made up the beds and cleaned the yards.

“Master Brown owned two farms.  He had plenty hands on his farms.  I did never go down to the farms much but I knowed the hands.  On Saturday little later than other days they brought the stock to the house and fed.  Then they went to the smokehouse for their rations.  He had a great big garden, strawberries, and grape arbors.

“One thing I had to do was worm the plants.  I put the worms in a bottle and leave it in the row where the sun would dry the worms up.  When a light frost come I would water the plants that would wilt before the sun riz and ag’in at night.  Then the plants never felt the frost.  Certainly it didn’t kill ’em.  It didn’t hurt ’em.

“Julane was the regular milk woman.  She milked and strained the milk.  I churned and ’tended to the chickens.  Miss Agnes sot the hens her own self.  She marked the eggs with a piece of charcoal to see if other hens laid by the setting hen.  If they did she’d take the new egg out of the nest.

“We had flower gardens.  We had mint, rosemary, tansy, sage, mullen, catnip, horseradish, artichokes, hoarhound—­all good home remedies.

“I never knowed when we moved to that farm.  I was so small.  I heard Miss Agnes Brown say I was a baby when they moved to Boldan depot, not fur from Clinton, Mississippi.

“When I left Miss Agnes I went to some folks my own color on another farm ’joining to their farm.  Of course I took my baby.  I took Anna and I been living with Anna ever since.  What I’d do now without her. (Anna is an Indian and very proud of being half Indian.) My husband done dead.