Mr. Wood took me with him to Antigua, to the town of St. John’s, where he lived.  This was about fifteen years ago.  He did not then know whether I was to be sold; but Mrs. Wood found that I could work, and she wanted to buy me.  Her husband then wrote to my master to inquire whether I was to be sold?  Mr. D——­ wrote in reply, “that I should not be sold to any one that would treat me ill.”  It was strange he should say this, when he had treated me so ill himself.  So I was purchased by Mr. Wood for 300 dollars, (or L100 Bermuda currency.)[9]

[Footnote 9:  About L67. 10s. sterling.]

My work there was to attend the chambers and nurse the child, and to go down to the pond and wash clothes.  But I soon fell ill of the rheumatism, and grew so very lame that I was forced to walk with a stick.  I got the Saint Anthony’s fire, also, in my left leg, and became quite a cripple.  No one cared much to come near me, and I was ill a long long time; for several months I could not lift the limb.  I had to lie in a little old out-house, that was swarming with bugs and other vermin, which tormented me greatly; but I had no other place to lie in.  I got the rheumatism by catching cold at the pond side, from washing in the fresh water; in the salt water I never got cold.  The person who lived in next yard, (a Mrs. Greene,) could not bear to hear my cries and groans.  She was kind, and used to send an old slave woman to help me, who sometimes brought me a little soup.  When the doctor found I was so ill, he said I must be put into a bath of hot water.  The old slave got the bark of some bush that was good for the pains, which she boiled in the hot water, and every night she came and put me into the bath, and did what she could for me:  I don’t know what I should have done, or what would have become of me, had it not been for her.—­My mistress, it is true, did send me a little food; but no one from our family came near me but the cook, who used to shove my food in at the door, and say, “Molly, Molly, there’s your dinner.”  My mistress did not care to take any trouble about me; and if the Lord had not put it into the hearts of the neighbours to be kind to me, I must, I really think, have lain and died.

It was a long time before I got well enough to work in the house.  Mrs. Wood, in the meanwhile, hired a mulatto woman to nurse the child; but she was such a fine lady she wanted to be mistress over me.  I thought it very hard for a coloured woman to have rule over me because I was a slave and she was free.  Her name was Martha Wilcox; she was a saucy woman, very saucy; and she went and complained of me, without cause, to my mistress, and made her angry with me.  Mrs. Wood told me that if I did not mind what I was about, she would get my master to strip me and give me fifty lashes:  “You have been used to the whip,” she said, “and you shall have it here.”  This was the first time she threatened to have me flogged; and she gave me the threatening so strong of what she would have done to me, that I thought I should have fallen down at her feet, I was so vexed and hurt by her words.  The mulatto woman was rejoiced to have power to keep me down.  She was constantly making mischief; there was no living for the slaves—­no peace after she came.