and come up to my room on Sundays and sit with me, saying, she did not want to be in the cabin when “strange niggers were there.”  This misfortune had disfigured her face and she always avoided meeting people.  I can see her now, with one child at the breast, and another at her knee, with her hand on its head, feeling for “buggars.”  I was very much attached to this woman and wanted to take care of her in her old age.  I went to Southern Texas to get her in 1873.  I found some of her children in Sherman, Texas, but aunt Judy had been dead six months.  She always said she wanted to live with me.

My mother always left her small children in the care of the servants.  I was quite a little girl before I was allowed to eat at “white folk’s table.”  Once my mother had been away several days and came home bringing a lot of company with her.  I ran out when I saw the carriages driving up, and cried:  “Oh, ma, I am so glad to see you.  I don’t mind sleeping with aunt Eliza, but I do hate to sleep with uncle Josh,” think I was quite dirty, and some of the colored servants snatched me out of sight.  Aunt Eliza was aunt Judy’s half-sister, her father was a white man.  She was given to my father by my grandmother, was very bright and handsome, and the mother of seventeen children.  My grandmother remembered aunt Eliza in her will, giving her some linen sheets, furniture, and other things.

One of aunt Eliza’s sons was named Newton.  My father had a mill and store up in Lincoln County, near Hustonville.  Newton used to do the hauling for my father with a large wagon and six-mule team.  He would often do the buying for the store and take measurements of grain, and my father trusted him implicitly.  Once a friend of my father said to him, as Newton was passing along the street with his team:  “George, I’ll give you seventeen hundred dollars for that negro.”  My father said:  “If you would fill that wagon-bed full of gold, you could not get him.”  A few weeks after that Newton died.  I remember seeing my father in the room weeping, and remember the chorus of the song the negroes sang on that occasion:  “Let us sit down and chat with the angels.”

The husband of aunt Eliza was “uncle Josh,” a small Guinea negro, as black as coal and very peculiar.  I always stood in awe of him, as all the children did.  I remember one expression of his was:  “Get out of the way, or I’ll knock you into a cocked hat.”  The reason I had to sleep with aunt Eliza, Betsy, my nurse, was only ten years older than I was.  Betsy was a girl given by my grandfather Campbell to my mother when my father and mother were married.  My mother was a widow when she married my father.  She had married Will Caldwell, a son of Capt.  Caldwell, who died in Sangamon County, Ill., he had freed his negroes and moved there from Kentucky.  Will Caldwell died after three years, leaving my mother with two children.  Both of them died at my grandfather Campbell’s in Mercer county, Kentucky, before she married my father.