ead body and laid it in the coffin with
his own hands. I'm telling you this for what happened later on.

A long time after peace, one evening mother heard a tapping at the door.
When she went, there was her old master, James Moore. "Angeline," he
said, "you remember me, don't you?" Course she did. Then he told her he
was hungry and homeless. A man hiding out. The Yankees had taken
everything he had. Mother took him in and fed him for two or three days
till he was rested. The other thing clear to my memory is when my uncle
Tom was sold. Another day when mother was washing at the wellhouse and I
was playing around, two white men came with a big, broad-shouldered
colored man between them. Mother put her arms around him and cried and
kissed him goodbye. A long time after, I was watching one of my brothers
walk down a path. I told mother that his shoulders and body look like
that man she kissed and cried over. "Why honey," she says to me, "can
you remember that?" Then she told me about my uncle Tom being sold away.

So you see, Miss, it's a good thing you are more interested in what I
know since slave days. I'll go on now.

The first thing after freedom my mother kept boarders and done fine
laundry work. She boarded officers of the colored Union soldiers; she
washed for the officers' families at the Arsenal. Sometimes they come
and ask her to cook them something special good to eat. Both my father
and mother were fine cooks. That's when we lived at Third and
Cumberland. I stayed home till I was sixteen and helped with the cooking
and washing and ironing. I never worked in a cottonfield. The boys did.
All us girls were reared about the house. We were trained to be lady's
maids and houseworkers. I married when I was sixteen. That husband died
four years later, and the next year I married this man, Joel Randolph
White. Married him in March, 1879. In those days you could put a house
on leased ground. Could lease it for five years at a time. My father put
up a house on Tenth and Scott. Old man Haynie owned the land and let us
live in the house for $25.00 a year until father's money was all gone;
then we had to move out. The first home my father really owned was at
1220 Spring street, what is now. Course then, it was away out in the
country. A white lawyer from the north--B.F. Rice was his name--got my
brother Jimmie to work in his office. Jimmie had been in school most all
his life and was right educated for colored boy then. Mr