“Once a week Mr. Heard allowed his slaves to have a frolic and folks would get broke down from so much dancing” Mrs. Avery remarked.  The music was furnished with fiddles.  When asked how the slaves came to own fiddles she replied, “They bought them with money they earned selling chickens.”  At night slaves would steal off from the Heard plantation, go to LaGrange, Ga. and sell chickens which they had raised.  Of course the masters always required half of every thing raised by each slave and it was not permissible for any slave to sell anything.  Another form of entertainment was the quilting party.  Every one would go together to different person’s home on each separate night of the week and finish that person’s quilts.  Each night this was repeated until every one had a sufficient amount of covering for the winter.  Any slave from another plantation, desiring to attend these frolics, could do so after securing a pass from their master.

Mrs. Avery related the occasion when her Uncle William was caught off the Heard plantation without a pass, and was whipped almost to death by the “Pader Rollers.”  He stole off to the depths of the woods here he built a cave large enough to live in.  A few nights later he came back to the plantation unobserved and carried his wife and two children back to this cave where they lived until after freedom.  When found years later his wife had given birth to two children.  No one was ever able to find his hiding place and if he saw any one in the woods he would run like a lion.

Mr. Heard was a very mean master and was not liked by any one of his slaves.  Secretly each one hated him.  He whipped unmercifully and in most cases unnecessarily.  However, he sometimes found it hard to subdue some slaves who happened to have very high tempers.  In the event this was the case he would set a pack of hounds on him.  Mrs. Avery related to the writer the story told to her of Mr. Heard’s cruelty by her grandmother.  The facts were as follows:  “Every morning my grandmother would pray, and old man Heard despised to hear any one pray saying they were only doing so that they might become free niggers.  Just as sure as the sun would rise, she would get a whipping; but this did not stop her prayers every morning before day.  This particular time grandmother Sylvia was in “family way” and that morning she began to pray as usual.  The master heard her and became so angry he came to her cabin seized and pulled her clothes from her body and tied her to a young sapling.  He whipped her so brutally that her body was raw all over.  When darkness fell her husband cut her down from the tree, during the day he was afraid to go near her.  Rather than go back to the cabin she crawled on her knees to the woods and her husband brought grease for her to grease her raw body.  For two weeks the master hunted but could not find her; however, when he finally did, she had given birth to twins.  The only thing that saved her was the fact that she was a mid-wife and always carried a small pin knife which she used to cut the navel cord of the babies.  After doing this she tore her petticoat into two pieces and wrapped each baby.  Grandmother Sylvia lived to get 115 years old.