as was the old
Master good. I was the house boy when I gets old enough to understand
what the Master wants done and I does it just like he says, so I
reckon that's why we always get along together.

The Master helped to raise my mammy. When I was born he says to her
(my mammy tells me when I gets older): "Cheney", the old Master say,
"that boy is going be different from these other children. I aims to
see that he is. He's going be in the house all the time, he ain't
going work in the fields; he's going to stay right with me all the
time."

They was about twenty slaves on the plantation but I was the one old
Master called for when he wanted something special for himself. I was
the one he took with him on the trips to town, I was the one who fetch
him the cooling drink after he look about the fields and sometimes I
carry the little black bag when he goes a-doctoring folks with the
misery away off some other farm.

The Master hear about there going be an auction one day and he
figgered maybe he needed some more slaves if they was good ones, so he
took me and started out early in the morning. It wasn't very far and
we got there early before the auction started. Rockon that was the
first time I ever see any slaves sold.

They was a long platform made of heavy planks and all the slaves was
lined up on the platform, and they was stripped to the waist, men,
women, and children. One or two of the women folks was bare naked.
They wasn't young women neither, just middle age ones, but they was
built good. Some of them was well greased and that grease covered up
many a scar they'd earned for some foolishment or other.

The Master don't buy none and pretty soon we starts home. The Master
was riding horseback,--he didn't ever use no buggy 'cause he said that
was the way for folks to travel who was too feeble to sit in the
saddle--and I rode back of him on another horse, but that horse I
rides is just horse while the Master's was a real thoroughbred like
maybe you see on race tracks down in the South.

That auction kept bothering me all the way back to the plantation. I
kept seeing them little children standing on the flatform (platform),
their mammy and pappy crying hard 'cause their young'uns is being
sold. They was a lot of heartaches even they was slaves and it gets me
worried.

I asked the Master is he going to have an auction and he jest laugh. I
ain't never sold no slaves yet and I ain't going to, he says. And I
gets