w their pappys like chillen do now.

"Most I 'members 'bout them times is work, 'cause we's put out in de
fields befo' day and come back after night. Then we has to shell a
bushel of corn befo' we goes to bed and we was so tired we didn't have
time for nothin'.

"Old man Jerry Driver watches us in de fields and iffen we didn't work
hard he whip us and whip us hard. Then he die and 'nother man call
Archer come. He say, 'You niggers now, you don't work good, I beat you,'
and we sho' worked hard then.

"Marse Greenville treated us pretty good but he never give us nothin'.
Sometime we'd run away and hide in de woods for a spell, but when they
cotch us Marse Greenville tie us down and whip us so we don't do it no
more.

"We didn't have no clothes like we do now, jes' cotton lowers and rubber
shoes. They used to feed us peas and cornbread and hominy, and sometime
they threw beef in a pot and bile it, but we never had hawg meat.

"Iffen we took sick, old Aunt Becky was de doctor. They was a building
like what they calls a hospital and she put us in there and give us
calomel or turpentine, dependin' on what ailed us. They allus kep' the
babies there and let de mammies come in and suckle and dry 'em up.

"I never heered much 'bout no war and Marse Greenville never told us we
was free. First I knows was one day we gwine to de fields and a man come
ridin' up and say, 'Whar you folks gwine?' We say we gwine to de fields
and then he say to Marse Greenville, 'You can't work these people,
without no pay, 'cause they's as free as you is.' Law, we sho' shout,
young folks and old folks too. But we stay there, no place to go, so we
jes' stay, but we gits a little pay.

"After 'while I marries. Allen Kelley was de first husban' what I ever
owned and he die. Houston Edmond, he the las' husban' I ever owned and
he die, too.

"Law me, they used to be a sayin' that chillen born on de dark of de
moon ain't gwineter have no luck, and I guess I sho' was born then!"

420217

[Illustration: Sam Kilgore]

SAM KILGORE, 92, was born a slave of John Peacock, of Williams
County, Tennessee, who owned one of the largest plantations in the
south. When he was eight years old, Sam accompanied his master to
England for a three-year stay. Sam was in the Confederate Army and
also served in the Spanish-American War. He came to Fort Worth in
1889 and learned cement work. In 1917 he started a cement
contra