“I saw the soldiers scouting.  They come most any time.  They go in and take every drop of milk out of the churn.  They took anything they could find and went away with it.  I seen the cavalry come through.  I thought they looked so pretty.  Their canteens was shining in the sun.  Miss Cornelia told me to hide, the soldiers might take me on with them.  I didn’t want to go.  I was very well pleased there at Miss Cornelia’s.

“I seen the cavalry come through that raised the ‘white sheet.’  I know now it must have been a white flag but they called it a white sheet to quit fighting.  It was raised a short time after they passed and they said they was the ones raised it.  I don’t know where it was.  I reckon it was a big white flag they rared up.  It was so they would stop fighting.

“Mars Sam Shan didn’t go to no war; he hid out.  He said it was a useless war, he wasn’t going to get shot up for no use a tall, and he never went a step.  He hid out.  I don’t know where.  I know Charles would take the baskets off.  Charles tended to the stock and the carriage.  He drove the wagon and carriage.  He fetched water and wood.  He was a black boy.  Mars Sam Shan said he wasn’t goiner loose his life for nothing.

“Miss Cornelia would cook corn light bread and muffins and anything else they had to cook.  Rations got down mighty scarce before it was done wid.  They put the big round basket nearly big as a split cotton basket out on the back portico.  Charles come and disappear with it.

“Chess and Charles was colored overseers.  He didn’t have white overseers.  Miss Cornelia and Miss Cloe would walk the floor and cry and I would walk between.  I would cry feeling sorry for them, but I didn’t know why they cried so much.  I know now it was squally times.  War is horrible.

“Mars Sam Shan come home, went down to the cabins—­they was scattered over the fields—­and told them the War was over, they was free but that they could stay.  Then come some runners, white men.  They was Yankee men.  I know that now.  They say you must get pay or go off.  We stayed that year.  Another man went to pa and said he would give him half of what he made.  He got us all up and we went to Pleasant Hill.  We done tolerable well.

“Then he tried to buy a house and five acres and got beat out of it.  The minor heirs come and took it.  I never learnt in books till I went to school.  Seem like things was in a confusion after I got big nough for that.  I’d sweep and rake and cook and wash the dishes, card, spin, hoe, scour the floors and tables.  I would knit at night heap of times.  We’d sing some at night.

“Colored folks couldn’t read so they couldn’t sing at church lessen they learnt the songs by hearing them at home.  Colored folks would meet and sing and pray and preach at the cabins.

“My first teacher was a white man, Mr. Babe Willroy.  I went to him several short sessions and on rainy days and cold days I couldn’t work in the field.  I worked in the field all my life.  Cook out in the winter, back to the field in the spring till fall again.