er when she was four years old.
The rest of the children were grown then. Master Hickman was the one who
bought her. I don't know the one that sold her. Hickman had a lot of
children her age and he raised her up with them. They were nice to her
all the time.

"Once the pateroles came near capturing her. But she made it home and
they didn't catch her.

"Mr. Candle hired her from her master when she was about eighteen years
old. He was nice to her but his wife was mean. Just because mother
wouldn't do everything the other servants said Mis' Candle wanted to
whip her. Mother said she knew that Mis' Candle couldn't whip her alone.
But she was 'fraid that she would have Sallie, another old Negro woman
slave, and Kitty, a young Negro woman slave, to help whip her.

"One day when it was freezing cold, she wanted mother to stand out in
the hall with Sallie and Clara and wash the glasses in boiling hot
water. She was making her do that because she thought she was uppity and
she wanted to punish her. When mother went out, she rattled the dishes
'round in the pan and broke them. They was all glasses. Mis' Candle
heard them breaking and come out to see about it. She wanted to whip
mother but she was 'fraid to do it while she was alone; so she waited
till her husband come home. When he come she told him. He said she
oughtn't to have sent them out in the cold to wash the glasses because
nobody could wash dishes outside in that cold weather.

"The first morning she was at Mis' Candle's, they called her to eat and
they didn't have nothing but black molasses and corn bread for mother's
meal. The other two ate it but mother didn't. She asked for something
else. She said she wasn't used to eating that--that she ate what her
master and mistress ate at home.

"Mis' Candle didn't like that to begin with. She told my mother that she
was a smart nigger. She told mother to do one thing and then before she
could do it, she would tell her do something else. Mother would just go
on doing the first thing till she finished that, and Mis' Candle would
git mad. But it wasn't nobody's fault but her own.

"She asked mother to go out and git water from the spring on a rainy
day. Mother wouldn't go. Finally mother got tired and went back home.
Her mistress heard what she had to tell her about the place she'd been
working. Then she said mother did right to quit. She had worked there
for three or four months. They meant to keep her but she wouldn't st