the family garden and each
slave family was required to cultivate a separate garden.

During the Civil War a battle was fought near the Miller plantation.
The Yankees under General Grant came through the country. They burned
2,000 bales of Miller cotton. When the Yankee wagons crossed Bayou
Creek the bridge gave way and quite a number of soldiers and horses
were seriously injured.

For many years after the War folks would find bullets in the ground.
Some of the bullets were 'twins' fastened together with a chain.

Master Miller settled my father upon a piece of land after the War and
we stayed on it several years, doing well.

I moved to Muskogee in 1902, coming on to Tulsa in 1907, the same year
Oklahoma was made a state. My six wives are all dead,--Liza, Lizzie,
Ellen, Lula, Elizabeth and Henrietta. Six children, too. George,
Anna, Salomon, Nelson, Garfield, Cosmos--all good children. They
remember the Tulsa riot and don't aim ever to come back to Oklahoma.

When the riot started in 1922 (I think it was), I had a place on the
corner of Pine and Owasso Streets. Two hundred of my people gathered
at my place, because I was so well known everybody figured we wouldn't
be molested. I was wrong. Two of my horses was shot and killed. Two of
my boys, Salomon and Nelson, was wounded, one in the hip, the other in
the shoulder. They wasn't bad and got well alright. Some of my people
wasn't so lucky. The dead wagon hauled them away!

White men came into the negro district and gathered up the homeless.
The houses were most all burned. No place to go except to the camps
where armed whites kept everybody quiet. They took my clothes and all
my money--$298.00--and the police couldn't do nothing about my loss
when I reported it to them.

That was a terrible time, but we people are better off today that any
time during the days of slavery. We have some privileges and they are
worth more than all the money in the world!

Oklahoma Writers' Project
Ex-Slaves

PHYLLIS PETITE
Age 83 yrs.
Fort Gibson, Okla.

I was born in Rusk County, Texas, on a plantation about eight miles
east of Belleview. There wasn't no town where I was born, but they had
a church.

My mammy and pappy belonged to a part Cherokee named W. P. Thompson
when I was born. He had kinfolks in the Cherokee Nation, and we all
moved up here to a place on Fourteen-Mile Creek close to where Hulbert
now is, 'way before I was big enough to remember anything. The