whide loaded
with rock, and every time they hit me the blood and hide done fly. They
drove me home to massa and told him and he called a old mammy to doctor
my back, and I couldn't work for four days. That never kep' me from
slippin' off 'gain, but I's more careful the next time.

"We'd go and fall right in at the door of the quarters at night, so
massa and the patterrollers thinks we's real tired and let us alone and
not watch us. That very night we'd be plannin' to slip off somewheres to
see a Negro gal or our wife, or to have a big time, 'specially when the
moon shine all night so we could see. It wouldn't do to have torch
lights. They was 'bout all the kind of lights we had them days and if we
made light, massa come to see what we're doin', and it be jus' too bad
then for the stray Negro!

"That there war brung suffrin' to lots of people and made a widow out of
my missis. Massa William, he go and let one them Yankees git him in one
of them battles and they never brung him home. Missis, she gits the
letter from his captain, braggin' on his bravery, but that never helped
him after he was kilt in the war. She gits 'nother letter that us
Negroes is free and she tells us. We had no place to go, so we starts to
cry and asks her what we gwine do. She said we could stay and farm with
her and work her teams and use her tools and land and pay her half of
what we made, 'sides our supplies. That's a happy bunch of Negroes when
she told us this.

"Late in that evenin' the Negroes in Huntsville starts hollerin' and
shoutin' and one gal was hollerin' loud and a white man come ridin' on a
hoss and leans over and cut that gal nearly half in two and a covered
wagon come along and picks her up and we never heared nothin' more.

"I married Imogene, a homely weddin' 'fore the war. We didn't have much
to-do at our weddin'. I asks missis if I could have Imogene and she says
yes and that's all they was to our weddin'. We had three boys and three
gals, and Imogene died 'bout twenty years ago and I been livin' with one
child and 'nother. I gits a little pension from the gov'ment and does
small jobs round for the white people.

"I 'lieve they ought to have gived us somethin' when we was freed, but
they turned us out to graze or starve. Most of the white people turned
the Negroes slam loose. We stayed a year with missis and then she
married and her husband had his own workers and told us to git out. We
worked for twenty and thirty cents a