icture of good slave holders, but sad to
say all were not of that type. [TR: deleted: 'See next sheet for'] a
picture of horror, which was also told me by my mother. [TR: deleted:
'The thought of it'] was like a nightmare to my childish mind.

The Story of little Joe.

[TR: deleted: 'Mother said there were'] two families lived on farms
adjacent to her father. They were the two Tucker brothers, tobacco
raisers. One of the wives, Polly, or Pol, as she was called, hated the
family of her husband's brother because they were more affluent than she
liked them to be. It [HW: Her jealousy] caused the two families to live
in disagreement.

Little Joe belonged to Pol's family, and was somewhere between ten and
fourteen years old. Mother said Pol made Joe work in the field at night,
and forced him to sing so they would know he wasn't asleep. He wore
nothing in summer but an old shirt made of rough factory cloth which
came below his knees. She said the only food Pol would give him was
swill [HW: scraps] from the table--handed to him out the back door.
Mother said Pol had some kind of impediment in her speech, which caused
her to say 'ah' at the close of a sentence. So, when she called Joe to
the back door to give him his mess of scraps, she would say, "Here, Joe,
here's your truck, ah." Mother was a little girl then, and she and
grandmother felt so sorry for Joe that they would bake baskets of sweet
potatoes and slip [TR: 'to the field to give him' replaced with
illegible text ending 'in the field']. She said he would come through
the corn, almost crawling, so Pol wouldn't see him, and take the sweet
potatoes in the tail of his shirt and scuttle back through the tall
stuff where he might hide and eat it them.

She had a Negro woman who had a baby (and there may have been other
women) but this Negro woman was not allowed to see her baby except just
as a cow would be let in to her calf at certain times during the day,
[TR: 'then' replaced by ??] she had to go to the field and leave it
alone. Mother said that Pol either threw or kicked the baby into the
yard because it cried, and it died. I don't know why the authorities
didn't arrest her, but she may have had an alibi, or some excuse for the
death of the child.

The Burning of the Tobacco Barn

The [HW: other] Tucker brother had made a fine crop of tobacco that
year, more than a thousand dollars worth in his big barn. Pol made one
of her slaves go with her, [HW: when] and