t in the kitchen and it had to be et in
the field. Little undergrowth of children--they had plenty of them on
the place--had to carry their meals to them.

"They would usually give them collars [HW: collards] in green times,
potatoes in potato time. Bread,--they didn't know what that was. White
folks hardly knew theirselves. They didn't have butter and they didn't
have no sugar. Didn't know much about what meat was yet. They would give
the little bits of children pot liquor. That's the most I ever seed them
git. Of course I was treated differently. You couldn't judge them by
me. I was the only half-white youngun round there, and they said I was
half-brother to ol Marse's chillun. And the white chillen would git me
up to the house to dance for them and all like, and they would give me
biscuits or anything good they had. I never seed the others eatin nothin
but pot liquor.

"Most of the slaves lived in log cabins. You know they never had but
one door. In general where they had large families, they would have two
rooms with a chimney in the middle of the house. The chimney was built
out of mud and straw. I can remember them sawin the timber. Two pulled a
big ol crosscut saw. Didn't have no saw mills then. This world has come
from a long ways. They used to didn't have no plows. It was without
form. You made it at home.

"They had ol homemade bedsteads to sleep in. They had a little rope
that ran back and forth instead of slats. That was called a corded bed.
Cheers were all made at home and were split bottoms.

"They didn't many of the slaves have food in their homes. But when they
did, they would jus have a little wooden box and they would put their
food in it.

"It seems like the white people got to burying their money during the
time of the war. That never come out till after the war. Then they got
to wantin that money and started looking for it. There never was any
talk of buried treasure before the war.

"My folks didn't give me any schoolin before the surrender. I never
got any before the surrender and a mighty little afterwards. No nigger
knowed anything. I started to farming when I was thirteen years old. I
used to be a fertilizer, and then a cotton sower. That was the biggest
I knowed about farming when I was a boy. My mother lived about fifteen
years after slavery. I reckon.

"In the time of slavery, you couldn't marry a woman. You just took up
with her. Mother married the same man she had been going with a