“Another time my mother had to go off and leave me.  I was older then.  I guess I must have gotten hungry and wanted to get somethin’ to eat.  So I got up and wandered off into the woods.  There weren’t many people living round there then. (This was in Trenton (?), Arkansas, a small place not far from Helena.) And the place was [HW:  not] built up much then and they had lots of wolves.  Wolves make a lot of noise when they get to trailin’ anything.  I got about a half mile from the road and the wolves got after me.  I guess they would have eat me up but a man heard them howling, and he knew there wasn’t no house around there but ours, and he came to see what was up, and he beat off the wolves and carried me back home.  There wasn’t nare another house round there but ours and he knew I must have come from there.

“Mother was working then.  It was night though.  They brung the news to her and they wouldn’t let her come to me.  Mother said she felt like getting a gun and killin’ them.  Her child out like that and they wouldn’t let her go home.

“That must have happened after freedom, because it was the last mistress she had.  Almost all her beatings and trouble came from her last mistress.  That woman sure gave her a lot of trouble.

Age, Good Masters

“All I know about my age is what my mother told me.

“The first people that raised my mother had her age in the Bible.  She said she was about fifteen years old when I was born.  From what she told me, I must be about seventy-eight years old.  She taught me that I was born on Sunday, on the thirtieth of January, in the year before the War.

“My mother’s name was Myles.  I don’t know what her first master’s name was.  She told me I was born in Phelps County, Missouri; I guess you’d call it St. Louis now.  I am giving you the straight truth just as she gave it to me.

“From the way she talked, the people what raised her from a child were good to her.  They raised her with their children.  Them people fed her just like they fed their own children.

Color and Birth

“There was a light brownskin boy around there and they give him anything that he wanted.  But they didn’t like my mother and me—­on account of my color.  They would talk about it.  They tell their children that when I got big enough, I would think I was good as they was.  I couldn’t help my color.  My mother couldn’t either.

“My mother’s mistress had three boys, one twenty-one, one nineteen, and one seventeen.  Old mistress had gone away to spend the day one day.  Mother always worked in the house.  She didn’t work on the farm in Missouri.  While she was alone, the boys came in and threw her down on the floor and tied her down so she couldn’t struggle, and one after the other used her as long as they wanted for the whole afternoon.  Mother was sick when her mistress came home.  When old mistress wanted to know what was the matter with her, she told her what the boys had done.  She whipped them and that’s the way I came to be here.