to stay
with Mrs. Green Parrish and she took me with her. Mr. Green Parrish was
gone to the war. In the last of the war, he was wounded and sent home.
While he was recovering I fanned the flies off him. That's the first
thing I remember about the war. When he got well he went back and then
the war soon ended. After the war ended father and the family moved to
Halifax County and worked on a farm belonging to Mr. Sterling Johnston.
I was in Warren County when I first began to remember anything and I do
not have any specific remembrance of the Yankees. We stayed in Halifax
County eighteen years, going from one plantation to another, but we
made no money. The landlords got all we made except what we ate and
wore. They would always tell us we ate ours up. Sometimes we would be
almost naked, barefooted and hungry when the crop was housed and then
the landlord would make us leave. We would go to another with about the
same results.

"There was a story going that each slave would get forty acres of land
and a mule at the end of the war. The Yankees started this story but
the mule and land was never given and slaves were turned out without
anything and with nowhere to go.

"We moved to Wake County and I farmed until 1903. I had not gotten one
hundred dollars ahead in all this time so I got a job with the
railroad, S.A.L. Shops in Raleigh, N.C. and that is the only place I
ever made any money.

"Father died in 1900 and mother in 1923. I worked from 1903 until 1920
with the S.A.L. Railroad as flunkey. I worked as box packer and
machinist's helper. Mother and father died without ever owning a house
but I saved my money while working for the Railroad Company and bought
this lot 157 X 52-1/2 and had this house built on it. The house has
five rooms and cost about one thousand dollars. I've been so of late
years I could not pay my taxes. I am partially blind and unable to work
anymore."

EH

* * * * *

Transcriber's Notes

All footnotes use numbers for consistency, and are reindexed.

Contractions match original text and are inconsistent due to the
variety of narrators and interviewers.

Page 5: Retained "Progro Marshells" and "Provo Marshell" inconsistency.

Pages 425-427 and 431-433: Retained inconsistent spellings for
"Yelladay", "Yellady", and "Yellerday".

Handwritten edits to punctuation, nested quotation marks, and the
following typos have been corrected:

Page 24: Changed