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house to house. You couldn't go out at night in Augusta after 9 o'clock. They had a bell at the old market down yonder, and it would strike every hour and half hour. There was an uptown market, too, at Broad and McKinne." Eugene told of an old Negro preacher, Ned Purdee, who had a school for Negro children in his back yard, in defiance of a law prohibiting the education of Negroes. Ned, said Eugene, was put in jail but the punishment of stocks and lashes was not intended to be executed. The sympathetic jailor told the old man: "Ned, I won't whip you. I'll just whip down on the stock, and you holler!" So Ned made a great noise, the jailor thrashed about with his stick, and no harm was done. Eugene touched on an unusual angle of slavery when he spoke of husbands and wives discovering that they were brother and sister. "They'd talk about their grandfathers and grandmothers, and find out that they had been separated when they were children," he said. "When freedom was declared, they called the colored people down to the parade ground. They had built a big stand, and the Yankees and some of the leading colored men made addresses. 'You are free now. Don't steal. Work and make a living. Do honest work. There are no more masters. You are all free.' He said the Negro troops came in, singing: "Don't you see the lightning? Don't you hear the thunder? It isn't the lightning, It isn't the thunder, It's the buttons on The Negro uniforms!" [MARY] Mary is a tiny woman, 90 years old. "I'd love to see some of the white folks boys and girls," she said, smiling and showing a set of strong new teeth. "We had school on our plantation, and a Negro teacher named Mathis, but they couldn't make me learn nothin'. I sure is sorry now!" Mary's plantation memories, in contrast to those of slaves who remember mostly molasses and corn-pone, include tomato rice, chickens, baked, fried and stewed. "And chicken pies!" Mary closed her eyes. "Don't talk about 'em! I told my grand children last week, I wanted to eat some old-time potato pie!" They played "peep-squirrel," Mary remembered. "I never could put up to dance much, but none could beat me runnin'. "Peep Squirrel" was a game we made up on the plantation. The girls peeped out, then ran by the men, and they'd be caught and twirled around. They said I was like a kildee bird, I was so little and could run so fast! They said I was married when I was 17 years old. I kno
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