ns
sold the hotel just at the beginning of the war. He moved to the
country. Mama cooked at the hotel and in the country both. The hotel was
a brick house on the railroad where they fed a lot of people every day.
Moster Milton used to take me bout where he went, rode me on his foot
when I was a baby. After they went to the farm every evening Mistress
Thursday come get me, take me to the house. She got bread and butter,
sugar, give it to me and I slept on a pallet in her room. I never did
know why she done that. Mama had a little house she slept in. She
cooked. They never whooped me. They never whooped mama.

"One time the Federal army camped not a great ways from us. One time I
was playing in a gully--big red ditch. I spied the Federals coming. I
flew out the ditch up the hill and across the field. They was calvary
men camped back of our field. We all left that place and refugeed to
another place. They didn't burn the house but they sent two bullets
through the walls or that house. 'Old Granny' was too old to refugee.
She kept living by herself in a house on the place. They never bothered
her. She wasn't kin to us but Moster Milton owned her and kept her fed.
We raised sugar-cane, hogs, corn, and goobers. The sugar-cane had
no top. I got a whooping every Monday. Mama whoop me. We go drink
sugar-cane juice in the trough at the mill. We got up in there with our
feet. They had to wash out the troughs. It was a wood house. It was a
big mill. He sold that good syrup in Atlanta. It wasn't sorghum. The men
at the mill would scare us but we hid around. They come up to the house
and tell on us.

"We had moved from the farm when they burned Atlanta. From the place
where Moster Milton refugeed I could hear a roaring all the time nearly,
sometimes clearer, and the roaring was broke sometimes.

"Moster Milton ran the farm when he run the hotel cept I was born at
the hotel and Mistress Thursday lived there then too. He had all Negro
overseers. Each overseer had a certain lot of hands to do what he told
them. He didn't have no trouble. He told them if they made something for
them and him too it would be fine, if they didn't work they would have
to do without. They had plenty they said.

"My mama was sold on the block in Virginia when she was twelve years
old. She and her little brother sold the same day. Moster Milton Stevens
bought her. The same man couldn't buy them both, didn't have money
enough. They had a little blanket and s