“Me and Zack (white) was raised up together.  He was one of the old set of children.  The baby in that set.  I’d set on the log across a branch and wait till Zack would break open a biscuit and sop it in ham gravy and bring it to me after he eat his breakfast.  One morning the sun was so bright; he run down there crying, said his mama was dead.  He never brought me no biscuit.  He had just got up.  I was five years old.  I said I was glad.  Emily was the cook and she come down there and kicked me off the log and made my nose bleed.  I cried and run home.  My mother picked me up in her arms, took me in her lap and asked me about it.  I told her I was glad ’cause she kept that little cowhide and whooped me with it.  They took me to the grave.  She wanted to be buried in a pretty grave at the side of the house off a piece.  She was buried there first.  There was a big crowd.  I kept running up towards the grave and they would pull me back by my dress tail.  She was buried in a metal coffin.  Susan was the oldest girl.  She fainted.  They took her to a carriage standing close.  The whole family was buried there.  Took back from places they lived to be buried in that graveyard.  That was close to Nuna, Georgia.

“When the old man Jep Davis married again, Miss Sally must have me sleep in her room on a pallet so I could tend to the baby.  The older girls would pick me and I would tell them what they talked about after they went to bed.

“When the War come on, the boys and Jep Davis dug a hole in the henhouse, put the guns in a box and buried them.  They was there when the War ended.  They had some jewelry.  I don’t know where they kept it.  They sent all of the niggers fifteen miles on the river away from the Yankees.  Not a one of us ever run off.  Not a one ever went to the War or the Yankees.  Jep Davis had been to get his mail on his horse.  A Yankee come up at the gate walking and took it.  He asked for the bridle and saddle but the Yankee laughed in his face.  We never seen our horse no more.  ‘Babe’ we called her.  She was a pretty horse and so gentle we could ride her bare back.

“Jep Davis was religious.  They had preaching at his church, the Baptist church at Nuna, for white folks in the morning and a white preacher preach for the niggers at the same church in the evening.  He’d go to prayer meeting on Wednesday night and Thursday night he would come to the boys’ house and read the Bible to his own niggers.  We would sing and pray.  He never cared how much we would sing and pray but he never better ketch ’em dancing.  He’d whoop every one of ’em.

“I learned same of the ABC’s in playing ball with the white children.  We never had a book.  I never went to school in my life.  The boys not married but up grown lived in a house to their own selves.  They got cooked fer up at Jep Davises house till they got a house built for them and give them a wife.  Maybe they would see a woman on another plantation and claim her.  Then the master had to talk that over.