camp in.

The negroes at our place and all of them around there didn't try to
get away or leave when the Yankees come in. They wasn't no place to
go, anyway, so they all stayed on. But they didn't do very much work.
Just enough to take care of themselves and their whitefolks.

Master Sack come home before the War was quite over. I think he had
been sick, because he looked thin and old and worried. All the negroes
picked up and worked mighty hard after he come home, too.

One day he went into Arcadia and come home and told us the War was
over and we was all free. The negroes didn't know what to make of it,
and didn't know where to go, so he told all that wanted to stay on
that they could just go on like they had been and pay him shares.

About half of his negroes stayed on, and he marked off land for them
to farm and made arrangements with them to let them use their cabins,
and let them have mules and tools. They paid him out of their shares,
and some of them finally bought the mules and some of the land. But
about half went on off and tried to do better somewheres else.

I didn't stay with him because I was jest a boy and he didn't need me
at the house anyway.

Late in the War my Pappy belonged to a man named Sander or Zander.
Might been Alexander, but the negroes called him Mr. Sander. When
pappy got free he come and asked me to go with him, and I went along
and lived with him. He had a share-cropper deal with Mr. Sander and I
helped him work his patch. That place was just a little east of Houma,
a few miles.

When my Pappy was born his parents belonged to a Mr. Adams, so he took
Adams for his last name, and I did too, because I was his son. I don't
know where Mr. Adams lived, but I don't think my Pappy was born in
Louisiana. Alabama, maybe. I think his parents come off the boat,
because he was very black--even blacker than I am.

I lived there with my Pappy until I was about eighteen and then I
married and moved around all over Louisiana from time to time. My wife
give me twelve boys and five girls, but all my children are dead now
but five. My wife died in 1920 and I come up here to Tulsa to live.
One of my daughters takes care and looks out for me now.

I seen the old Sack P. Gee place about twenty years ago, and it was
all cut up in little places and all run down. Never would have known
it was one time a big plantation ten miles long.

I seen places going to rack and ruin all around--all the places I
li