the Big House and there we found old Miss crying and talking about how
she hated to lose her good niggers.

Abraham Lincoln! Why we mourned three months for that man when he
died! I wouldn't miss a morning getting my black arm band and placing
it on in remembrance of Abraham, who was the best friend the Negroes
ever had. Now old Jeff Davis, I didn't care a thing about him. He was
a Democrat and none of them mean anything to the Negro. And if these
young Negroes don't quit messing with the democratic bunch they are
going to be right back where we started from. If they only knew as I
know they would struggle to keep such from happening, because although
I had a good master I wouldn't want to go through it again.

Oklahoma Writers' Project
Ex-Slaves

MARY GRAYSON
Age 83 yrs.
Tulsa, Oklahoma

I am what we colored people call a "native." That means that I didn't
come into the Indian country from somewhere in the Old South, after
the War, like so many negroes did, but I was born here in the old
Creek Nation, and my master was a Creek Indian. That was eighty three
years ago, so I am told.

My mammy belonged to white people back in Alabama when she was
born--down in the southern part I think, for she told me that after
she was a sizeable girl her white people moved into the eastern part
of Alabama where there was a lot of Creeks. Some of them Creeks was
mixed up with the whites, and some of the big men in the Creeks who
come to talk to her master was almost white, it looked like. "My white
folks moved around a lot when I was a little girl", she told me.

When mammy was about 10 or 13 years old some of the Creeks begun to
come out to the Territory in little bunches. They wasn't the ones who
was taken out here by the soldiers and contractor men--they come on
ahead by themselves and most of them had plenty of money, too. A Creek
come to my mammy's master and bought her to bring out here, but she
heard she was being sold and run off into the woods. There was an old
clay pit, dug way back into a high bank, where the slaves had been
getting clay to mix with hog hair scrapings to make chinking for the
big log houses that they built for the master and the cabins they made
for themselves. Well, my mammy run and hid way back in that old clay
pit, and it was way after dark before the master and the other man
found her.

The Creek man that bought her was a kind sort of a man, mammy said,
and wouldn't let the master puni