“Sometimes they had corn shuckings.  That was where they did the serving, and that was where they had the big eatings.  They’d lay out a big pile of corn.  Everybody would get down and throw the corn out as they shucked it.  They would have a fellow there they would call the general.  He would walk from one person to another and from one end of the pile to the other and holler and the boys would answer.  His idea was to keep them working.  If they didn’t do something to keep them working, they wouldn’t get that corn shucked that night.  Them people would be shucking corn!  There would be a prize to the one who got the most done or who would be the first to get done.  They would sing while they were shucking.  They had one song they would sing when they were getting close to the finish.  Part of it went like this: 

  ’Red shirt, red shirt
  Nigger got a red shirt.’

After the shucking was over, they would have pies, beef, biscuits, corn bread, whiskey if you wanted it.  I believe that was the most they had.  They didn’t have any ice-cream.  They didn’t use ice-cream much in those days.  Didn’t have no ice down there in the country.  Not a bit of ice there.  If they had anything they wanted to save, they would let it down in the well with a rope and keep it cool down there.  They used to do that here until they stopped them from having the wells.

“Ring plays too.  Sometimes when they wanted to amuse themselves, they would play ring plays.  They all take hands and form a ring and there would be one in the center of the ring.  Now he is got to get out.  He would come up and say, ’I am in this lady’s garden, and I’ll bet you five dollars I can get out of here.’  And d’reckly he would break somebody’s hands apart and get out.

How Freedom Came

“The old boss called ’em up to the house and told ’em, ’You are free as I am.’  That was one day in June.  I went on in the house and got something to eat.  My mother and father, he hired them to stay and look after the crop.  Next year, my mother and father went to Ben Hook’s place and farmed on shares.  But my father died there about May.  Then it wasn’t nobody working but me and my sister and mother.

What the Slaves Got

“The slaves never got nothing.  Alexander Stephens, the Vice-President of the Confederacy, divided his plantation up and gave it to his darkies when he died.  I knew him and his brother too.  Alexander[HW:  *] never did walk.  He was deformed.  Big headed rascal, but he had sense!  His brother was named Leonard[HW:  *].  He was a lawyer.  He really killed himself.  He was one of these die-hard Southerners.  He did something and they arrested him.  It made him so mad.  He’d bought him a horse.  He got on that horse and fell off and broke his neck.  That was right after the War.  They kept garrisons in all the counties right after the War.