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