“My father’s owner was Jim Dixon in Elmo County, Virginia.  That is where I was born.  I am 81 years old.  Jim Dixon had several boys—­Baldwin and Joe.  Joe took some of the slaves, his pa give him, and went to New Mexico to shun the war.  Uncle and pa went in the war as waiters.  They went in at the ending up.  We lived on the big road that run to the Atlantic Ocean.  Not far from Richmond.  Ma lived three or four miles from Pa.  She lived across big creek—­now they call it Farrohs Run.  Ma belong to Harper Williams.  Pa’s folks was very good but Ma’s folks was unpleasant.

“Ma lived to be 103 years old.  Pa died in 1905 and was 105 years old.  I used to set on Grandma’s lap and she told me about how they used to catch people in Africa.  They herded them up like cattle and put them in stalls and brought them on the ship and sold them.  She said some they captured they left bound till they come back and sometimes they never went back to get them.  They died.  They had room in the stalls on the boat to set down or lie down.  They put several together.  Put the men to themselves and the women to themselves.  When they sold Grandma and Grandpa at a fishing dock called New Port, Va., they had their feet bound down and their hands bound crossed, up on a platform.  They sold Grandma’s daughter to somebody in Texas.  She cried and begged to let them be together.  They didn’t pay no ’tenshion to her.  She couldn’t talk but she made them know she didn’t want to be parted.  Six years after slavery they got together.  When a boat was to come in people come and wait to buy slaves.  They had several days of selling.  I never seen this but that is the way it was told to me.

“The white folks had an iron clip that fastened the thumbs together and they would swing the man or woman up in a tree and whoop them.  I seen that done in Virginia across from where I lived.  I don’t know what the folks had done.  They pulled the man up with block and tackle.

“Another thing I seen done was put three or four chinquapin switches together green, twist them and dry them.  They would cry like a leather whip.  They whooped the slaves with them.

“Grandpa was named Sam Abraham and Phillis Abraham was his mate.  They was sold twice.  Once she was sold away from her husband to a speculator.  Well, it was hard on the Africans to be treated like cattle.  I never heard of the Nat Turner rebellion.  I have heard of slaves buying their own freedom.  I don’t know how it was done.  I have heard of folks being helped to run off.  Grandma on mother’s side had a brother run off from Dalton, Mississippi to the North.  After the war he come to Virginia.

“When freedom was declared we left and went to Wilmington and Wilson, North Carolina.  Dixon never told us we was free but at the end of the year he gave my father a gray mule he had ploughed for a long time and part of the crop.  My mother jes picked us up and left her folks now.  She was cooking then I recollect.  Folks jes went wild when they got turned loose.