dy was his own slave. That's the way both them white
men had been taught, and that was the way they both lived.

Old Master had about five wagons on that trip down into Louisiana, but
they was all full of stuff and only the old slaves and children could
ride in them. I was big enough to walk most of the time, but one time
I walked in the sun so long that I got sick and they put me in the
wagon for most the rest of the way.

We would come to places where the people said the Yankees had been and
gone, but we didn't run into any Yankees. They was most to the north
of us I reckon, because we went on down to the south part of
Mississippi and ferried across the big river at Baton Rouge. Then we
went on to Lafayette, Louisiana, before we settled down anywhere.

All us Negroes thought that was a mighty strange place. We would hear
white folks talking and we couldn't understand what they said, and
lots of the Negroes talked the same way, too. It was all full of
French people around Lafayette, but they had all their menfolks in the
Confederate Army just the same. I seen lots of men in butternut
clothes coming and going hither and yon, but they wasn't in bunches.
They was mostly coming home to see their folks.

Everybody was scared all the time, and two--three times when old
Master hired his Negroes out to work the man that hired them quit his
place and went on west before they got the crop in. But old Master
got a place and we put in a cotton crop, and I think he got some money
by selling his place in Mississippi. Anyway, pretty soon after the
cotton was all in he moves again and goes to a place on Simonette Lake
for the winter. It aint a bit cold in that place, and we didn't have
no fire 'cepting to cook, and sometimes a little charcoal fire in some
crock pots that the people left on the place when they went on out to
Texas.

The next spring old Master loaded up again and we struck out for
Texas, when the Yankees got too close again. But Master Bill didn't go
to Texas, because the Confederates done come that winter and made him
go to the army. I think they took him to New Orleans, and old Master
was hopping mad, but he couldn't do anything or they would make him go
too, even if he was a preacher.

I think he left out of there partly because he didn't like the people
at that place. They wasn't no Baptists around anywheres, they was all
Catholics, and old Master didn't like them.

About that time it look like everybody in