“My folks didn’t give me any schoolin before the surrender.  I never got any before the surrender and a mighty little afterwards.  No nigger knowed anything.  I started to farming when I was thirteen years old.  I used to be a fertilizer, and then a cotton sower.  That was the biggest I knowed about farming when I was a boy.  My mother lived about fifteen years after slavery.  I reckon.

“In the time of slavery, you couldn’t marry a woman.  You just took up with her.  Mother married the same man she had been going with after freedom.  She had four children after the surrender as fer as I can tell—­three girls and two boys.

“I moved from North Carolina to Louisiana.  Stayed there one year and then moved here.  Bought forty acres of land.  Bought it after I’d been here a year.  It took me four years to pay for that.  Then next time I bought eighty acres and paid for them.  Paid them out in two years.  Then I bought eighty acres more and paid for them in two years.  Couldn’t pay for them cash at first, but could have paid for the last eighty when I bought them if I had a wanted to.  Then I bought eighty more and then I bought eighty again and then forty and on till I had five hundred and three acres of farm land.  I got the three over when I got the sorghum mill.

“I left my farm and come to the city for doctor’s treatment.  My old lady and I worked out five hundred and three acres of land.  I got five children living.  I gave each one of them forty acres of land.  Most of the rest I sold.  I got a fellow here that owes me for one of the places now.  He lives over on Third and Dennison.  His name is Wright.  My old lady an me held on to that and didn’t lose it even in all these hard years.

“My daughter kept after me to come here and she built this little house out here where I could holler or do anything I wanted to do and not disturb nobody.  I couldn’t feel at home up in a big house with other people.  Four or five months ago it would take two people to put me to bed.  I would get off from home and have to carry me back.  But I am gettin along fine now.  This high blood pressure keeps me from remembering so well.  Ol lady where’s my pipe?  You didn’t find it up to daughter’s?  Ain’t it in the kitchen?  Can’t you find it nowheres?  What didju do with it?  Well, you needn’t look for it no longer.  It’s here in my pocket.  That’s my high blood pressure workin.  That whut it does to you.

“I belong to the Primitive Baptist Church and have been belonging to it altogether about sixty-three years.  I used to be a Missionary.  I been a member of the church a long time.

“I think times are jus fulfilling the Bible.  The people are wiser now than we ever known them to be and wickeder.  I don’t believe the times you see now will be always.  People are getting so wise and so wicked that I think the end is near at hand.  You notice the Germans now are trying to make slaves out of the Jews.  There’s the Japans that is jus slaughtering up the Chinese like they was nothin but dumb brutes.  The world is wickeder than it ever has been before.