ng pipes.
My foreman was Tom Flanigan--he must have been a full-blooded Frenchman!

"But what I want to say is, we didn't have no idea of runnin' and
escapin'. We was happy. We got our lickings, but just the same we got
our fill of biscuits every time the white folks had 'em. Nobody knew how
it was to lack food. I tell my chillen we didn't know no more about
pants than a hawg knows about heaven; but I tells 'em that to make 'em
laugh. We had all the clothes we wanted and if you wanted shoes bad
enough you got 'em--shoes with a brass square toe. And shirts! Mister,
them was shirts that was shirts! If someone gets caught by his shirt on
a limb of a tree, he had to die there if he weren't cut down. Them
shirts wouldn't rip no more'n buckskin.

"The end of the war, it come jus' like that--like you snap your
fingers."

"How did you know the end of the war had come?" asked the interviewer.

"How did we know it! Hallelujah broke out--

"'Abe Lincoln freed the nigger
With the gun and the trigger;
And I ain't goin' to get whipped any more.
I got my ticket,
Leavin' the thicket,
And I'm a-headin' for the Golden Shore!'

"Soldiers, all of a sudden, was everywhere--comin' in bunches, crossin'
and walkin' and ridin'. Everyone was a-singin'. We was all walkin' on
golden clouds. Hallelujah!

"'Union forever,
Hurrah, boys, hurrah!
Although I may be poor,
I'll never be a slave--
Shoutin' the battle cry of freedom.'

"Everybody went wild. We all felt like heroes and nobody had made us
that way but ourselves. We was free. Just like that, we was free. It
didn't seem to make the whites mad, either. They went right on giving us
food just the same. Nobody took our homes away, but right off colored
folks started on the move. They seemed to want to get closer to freedom,
so they'd know what it was--like it was a place or a city. Me and my
father stuck, stuck close as a lean tick to a sick kitten. The Gudlows
started us out on a ranch. My father, he'd round up cattle, unbranded
cattle, for the whites. They was cattle that they belonged to, all
right; they had gone to find water 'long the San Antonio River and the
Guadalupe. Then the whites gave me and my father some cattle for our
own. My father had his own brand, 7 B ), and we had a herd to start out
with of seventy.

"We knowed freedom was on us, but we didn't know what was to come with
it. We thought we was goin' to get rich like the white folks. W