uld come to his house and he would call
himself showing them how to catch old people he didn't like. He told
them how to catch my old man. I have heard my mother tell about it time
and time again. The funny part of it was there was a cornfield right
back of the kitchen. Just about dusk dark, he got up and taken a big
old horse pistol and shot out of it, and when he fired the last shot out
of it, a white man said, 'Bring that gun here.' Believe me he cut a road
through that field right now.

"They stayed 'round for a little while and tried to bully his people.
But the old lady stood up to them, so they finally carried her and her
children in the house and told her to tell him to come on back they
wouldn't hurt him. And they didn't bother him no more.

"My mother's master told my mother that she was free. He called all the
slaves in and told them they were free as he was. I don't think he give
them anything when they were freed. He was a kind a poor fellow. Didn't
have but six or seven slaves. He offered to let them stay and make
crops. My father had a better job than that. Did you ever know Bishop
Lane out in Tennessee? My father and he were ordained at the same time
in the some C. M. E. Church. Then he moved to Kentucky and joined the
A. M. E. Church. My father died in 1875 and my mother in 1906.

"I have been married forty-seven years. I married on the twenty-sixth
day of December in 1889. I heard my mother and father say that they
married in slavery time and they just jumped over a broom. I don't
belong to no church. I am off on a pension. I got a good job doin'
nothing. My pension is paid by the Railroad.

"I put up forty-four years as a brakeman and five years on ditching
trains before I went to braking. My old road master put me on the
braking. A fellow got his fingers cut off and they turned his keys over
to me and put me to braking and I went there and stayed.

"I have two children. Both of them are living--a girl and a boy. I have
had a big bunch of young people 'round me ever since I married. Raised
a couple of nephews. Then my two. All of them married. That is my
daughter's oldest child right there. (He pointed to a pretty brownskin
girl--ed.)

"My father died when I was eight, and I was away from home railroading
most of the time and didn't hear much about old times from my mother. So
that's all I know.

"I have lived right here on this spot for forty-three years. About 1893
I bought this place and ha