ipped some of the Negroes.

The preacher was telling about the Bible days when the Klan rode up.
They was all masked up and everybody crawled under the benches when
they shouted: "We'll make you damn niggers wish you wasn't free!"

And they just about did. The preacher got the worst whipping, blood
was running from his nose and mouth and ears, and they left him laying
on the floor.

They whipped the women just like the men, but Mammy and the girls
wasn't touched none and we run all the way back to the cabin. Layed
down with all our clothes on and tried to sleep, but we's too scairt
to close our eyes.

Mammy reckoned old Master Lowery was a-riding with the Klan that
night, else we'd got a flogging too.

We first moved about a mile from Master Lowery's place and ever week
we'd ask mammy if we children could go see old Master and she'd say:
"Yes, if you-all are good niggers."

The old Master was always glad to see us children and he would give us
candy and apples and treat us mighty fine.

The old plantations gone, the old Masters gone, the old slaves is
gone, and I'll be a going some of these days, too, for I been here a
mighty long time and they ain't nobody needs me now 'cause I is too
old for any good.

Oklahoma Writers' Project
Ex-Slaves

"UNCLE" GEORGE G. KING
Age 83 yrs
Tulsa, Oklahoma

"Prayers for sale.... Prayers for sale...." Uncle George chants in
sing-song fashion as he roams around Tulsa's Greenwood Negro
district--pockets filled with prayer papers that are soiled and dirty
with constant handling.

But they are potent, Uncle George tells those who fear the coming of
some trouble, disaster or just ordinary misery, and there's a special
prayer for each and every trouble--including one to keep away the bill
collector when the young folks forget to make payments on the radio,
the furniture, the car, or the Spring outfit purchased months ago from
the credit clothier.

Its all in the Bible and the Bible is his workshop--'cause folks don't
know how to pray.

He's mighty old, is Uncle George King, and he'll tell you that he was
born on two-hundred acres of Hell, but the whitefolks called it Samuel
Roll's plantation (six miles N.E. of Lexington, South Carolina).

Kinder small for a plantation, Uncle George explains, but plenty room
for that devil overseer to lay on the lash, and plenty room for the
old she-devil Mistress to whip his mammy til' she was just a piece of
living raw meat!

T