“I remember one incident he told me.  His master hired a new overseer who hung around for a bit watching my father.  Finally, my father asked him, ‘Now, what are you able to do?’ The overseer answered.  ’Why, I can see all over and whip all over, and that’s as much as any damn man can do.’

“Nobody was allowed to touch my father.  He never had no trouble with the pateroles either.  Old man Simpson didn’t allow that.  He was a free agent.  When he wasn’t working for Simpson, he was working for the next big farmer, and then the next one, and then the next one, and old man Simpson got wages for his work.  Sometimes he worked a contract.  Old man Simpson couldn’t afford to have him handicapped in his going and coming.  He could go whenever he wanted to go, and come back whenever he got ready, with a pass or without one.  His time was valuable.

“The reason why so many slaves suffered as much as they did as a rule was not because of the masters but because of the poor white trash overseers.  I know of several rich white women that had slaves that wouldn’t allow them to be mistreated.  They would fire four and five overseers to keep their slaves from being mistreated.

Mean Masters

“But there were some mean masters.  I have heard that right there in Georgia there was one white planter—­I think it was Brantley—–­who put one of his slaves that had been unruly in a packing screw and ran it down on him till he mashed him to death.  The cotton screw was the thing they pressed cotton bales in.  They run it down by steam now, but then, they used to run it down with two mules.  They tell a lot of things like that on Brantley.  Of course, I couldn’t personally know it, but I know he was mighty mean and I know the way he died.

Bushwhacking the Ku Klux

“He belonged to the paterole gang and they went out after the Negroes one night after freedom.  The Negroes bushwhacked them and killed four or five of them.  They give it out that the men that was killed had gone to Texas.  Brantley was one of the killed ones.  The pateroles was awful bad at that time.  Ku Klux they called them after the War, but they was the same people.  I never heard of the Klan part till this thing come up that they have now.  They called them Ku Klux back when I was a boy.  My stepmother carried me over to Brantley’s house the night he got killed.  So I know the Texas he went to.  That was in ’69 or ’70.  He lived about a mile from us and when he got killed, she carried me over to see him just like we would have gone to see any other neighbor.

“The Negroes were naturally afraid of the Ku Klux but they finally got to the place where they were determined to break it up.  They didn’t have no ropes, but they would take grapevines and tie them across the road about breast high when a man would be on horseback.  The Ku Klux would run against these vines and be knocked off their horses into the road and then the bushwhackers would shoot them.  When Ku Klux was killed in this manner, it was never admitted; but it was said that they had gone to Texas.  There was several of them went to Texas one night.