any overseer like the Cherokee Negroes had lots of times. We
didn't have to work if they wasn't no work to do that day.

Everybody could have a little patch of his own, too, and work it
between times, on Saturdays and Sundays if he wanted to. What he made
on that patch belong to him, and the old Chief never bothered the
slaves about anything.

Every slave can fix up his own cabin any way he want to, and pick out
a good place with a spring if he can find one. Mostly the slave houses
had just one big room with a stick-and-mud chimney, just like the poor
people among the Creeks had. Then they had a brush shelter built out
of four poles with a roof made out of brush, set out to one side of
the house where they do the cooking and eating, and sometimes the
sleeping too. They set there when they is done working, and lay around
on corn shuck beds, because they never did use the log house much only
in cold and rainy weather.

Old Chief just treat all the Negroes like they was just hired hands,
and I was a big girl before I knowed very much about belonging to him.

I was one of the youngest children in my family; only Sammy and
Millie was younger than I was. My big brothers was Adam, August and
Nero, and my big sisters was Flora, Nancy and Rhoda. We could work a
mighty big patch for our own selves when we was all at home together,
and put in all the work we had to for the old Master too, but after
the War the big children all get married off and took up land of they
own.

Old Chief lived in a big log house made double with a hall in between,
and a lot of white folks was always coming there to see him about
something. He was gone off somewhere a lot of the time, too, and he
just trusted the Negroes to look after his farms and stuff. We would
just go on out in the fields and work the crops just like they was our
own, and he never come around excepting when we had harvest time, or
to tell us what he wanted planted.

Sometimes he would send a Negro to tell us to gather up some chickens
or turkeys or shoats he wanted to sell off, and sometimes he would
send after loads of corn and wheat to sell. I heard my pappy say old
Chief and Mr. Chili McIntosh was the first ones to have any wheat in
the Territory, but I don't know about that.

Along during the War the Negro men got pretty lazy and shiftless, but
my pappy and my big brothers just go right on and work like they
always did. My pappy always said we better off to stay on the