“My mother seen her master take off a big pot of money to bury.  He didn’t know he’d been seen.  She didn’t know where he went, but she seen the direction he took.  Her master was Paul Barringer.  That was on McKeever Creek near Sardis.  It was near the end of the war.  I never heard my mother say what became of the money, but I guess he got it back after everything was over.

“They had to work all the time.  When they went to church on Sunday, they would tell them not to steal their master’s things.  How could they help but steal when they didn’t have nothin’?  You didn’t eat if you didn’t steal.

“My mother never would have been sold but the first bunch of slaves Barringer bought ran away from him and went back to the places where they come from.  Lots of the old people wouldn’t stay anywheres only at their homes.  They would go back if they were sold away.  It took a long time because they walked.  When my mother and father were sold they had to walk.  It took them six weeks,—­from Charlottesville, North Carolina to Sardis, Mississippi.

“In Sardis my father was made the coachman, and mother was sent to the field.  Master was mean and hard.  Whipped them lots.  Mother had to pick cotton all day every day and Sunday.  When I first seen my father to remember him, he had on a big old coat which was given to him for special days.  We called it a ham-beater.  It had pieces that would make it set on you like a basque.  He wore a high beaver hat too.  That was his uniform.  Whenever he drove, he had to dress up in it.

“My mother tickled me.  She said she went out one day and kill a billygoat, but when she went to get it it was walking around just like the rest of them.  My mother couldn’t eat hogshead after freedom because they dried them and give them to them in slave time.  You had to eat what you could git then.

“My mother said you jumped over a broomstick when you married.

“My father and mother were not exactly sold to Mississippi.  My father was but my mother wasn’t.  When Paul Barringer lost all of his niggers, what he first had, his sister give him my mother and a whole lot more of them.  I don’t know how many he had, but he had a great many.  My father went alone, but all my mother’s people were taken—­four sisters, and three brothers.  They were all grown when I first seen them.  I never seen my mother’s father at all.

“There was a world of yellow people then.  My mother said her sister had two yellow children; they were her master’s.  I know of plenty of light people who were living at that time.

“My mother had two light children that belonged to her sister.  They were taken from her after freedom, and were made to cook and work for their sister and brother (white).  All the orphans were taken and given back to the people what owned them when freedom came.  My mother’s sister was refugeed back to Charlottesville, North Carolina before the end of the war so that she wouldn’t get free.  After the war they were set free out there and never came back.  The children were with my mother and they had to stay with their master until they were twenty years old.  Then they would be free.  They wouldn’t give them any schooling at all.  They were as white as the white children nearly but their mother was a colored woman.  That made the difference.