dn't sleep under 'em. What happened? Well, they'd pinch your toes
till you couldn't stand it. I was just a boy and I was sleepin' with my
mother when it happened. Now that's straight stuff. What do I think was
the cause? Well, I think that white lady didn't want no nigger to have
them quilts. I don't know what mother did with 'em, but that white lady
just wouldn't let her have 'em.

"Now I'm puttin' the oil out of the can--I mean that what I say is true.
People now will say they ain't nothin' to that story. At that time the
races wasn't 'malgamated. But people are different now--ain't like they
was seventy-five years ago.

"Visions? Well, now I'm glad you asked me that. I'll take pleasure in
tellin' you. Two years before I moved to this place I had a vision and I
think I saw every colored person that was ever born in America, I
believe. I was on the east side of my house and this multitude of people
was about four feet from me and they was as thick as sardines in a box
and they was from little tots up. Some had on derby hats and some was
bareheaded. I talked with one woman--a brown skinned woman. They was
sitting on seats just like circus seats just as far as my eyes could
behold. Looked like they reached clear up in the sky. That was when I
fust went blind. You've read about how John saw the multitude a hundred
forty and four thousand and I think that was about one-fourth of what I
saw. They was happy and talkin' and nothin' but colored people--no white
people.

"Another vision I had. I dreamed that the day that I lived to be
sixty-five, that day I would surely die. I thought the man that told me
that was a little old dried-up white man up in the air and he had scales
like the monkey and the cat weighed the cheese. I thought he said, 'That
day you will surely die,' and one side of the scales tipped just a
little and then I woke up. You know I believed this strong. That was in
1919 and I went out and bought a lot in Bellwood Cemetery. But I'm still
livin'.

"Old Major Crawley who owned what they called the Reader place on this
side of the river, four miles east of Dexter, he was supposed to have
money buried on his place. He owned it during slavery and after he died
his relatives from Mississippi come here and hired a carriage driver
named Jackson Jones. He married my second cousin. And he took 'em up
there to dig for the money, but I don't know if they ever found it. Some
people said the place was ha'nted."