We called it de settlement, but on
other plantations where white folks lived there too they called it de
quarters. We always kept this big house clean and ready, and sometimes
de white folks come out from town and stay a few days and hunt and
fish and look over de crops.

We all worked at farm work. Cotton and corn and tobacco mostly. We all
laid off Sunday after noontime, but we didn't have no church nor
preaching and we didn't hear anything 'bout Jesus much until after de
emancipation.

I reckon old Master wasn't very religious, 'cause he never tell us
'bout the Holy Word. He jest said to behave ourselves and tell him
when we wanted to marry, and not have but one wife.

We had little garden patches and cotton patches we could work on
Sunday and what de stuff brung we could sell and keep the money. Old
Master let us have what we made that way on Sunday. We could buy
ribbons and hand soap and coal oil and such at de store. Master Irvin
was always honest 'bout continuing de money, too.

We didn't have no carders and spinners nor no weavers on de
plantation. They cost too much money to buy just for 25 niggers, and
they cost a lot more than field niggers. So we got our clothes sent
out to us from in town, and sometimes we was give cloth from de store
to make our clothes out of.

We got de shorts and seconds from de mill when we had wheat ground,
and so we had good wheat bread as well as corn pone, and de big
smokehouse was on de place and we had all de meat we wanted to eat.
Old Master sent out after de meat he wanted every day or so and we
kept him in garden sass that way too.

We was right between de forks of Big Beaver and Little Beaver and we
could go fishing without getting far off de place. We couldn't go far
away without a pass, though, and they wasn't nobody on the place to
write us a pass, so we couldn't go to meeting and dances and sech.

But de niggers on de other plantations could get passes to come to our
place, and so we had parties sometimes there at our place. We always
had them on Sundays, 'cause in the evening we would be too tired to
work if we set up, and the other masters wouldn't give passes to their
niggers to come over in de evening.

We had a white doctor lived at de next plantation, and old Master had
a contract with old Dr. Brown to look after us. He had a beard as long
as your arm. He come for all kinds of misery except bornings. Then we
had a mid-wife who was a white woman lived down