live by to git along
in this world, too.

The Cherokee didn't have no jail for Negroes and no jail for
themselves either. If a man done a crime he come back to take his
punishment without being locked up.

None of the Negroes ran away when I was a child that I know of. We all
had plenty to eat. The Negroes didn't have no school and so I can't
read and write, but they did have a school after the War, I hear. But
we had a church made out of a brush arbor and we would sing good songs
in Cherokee sometimes.

I always got Sunday off to play, and at night I could go git a piece
of sugar or something to eat before I went to bed and Mistress didn't
care.

We played bread-and-butter and the boys played hide the switch. The
one found the switch got to whip the one he wanted to.

When I got sick they give me some kind of tea from weeds, and if I et
too many roasting ears and swole up they biled gourds and give me the
liquor off'n them to make me throw up.

I've been a good church-goer all my life until I git too feeble, and I
still understand and talk Cherokee language and love to hear songs and
parts of the Bible in it because it make me think about the time I was
a little girl before my mammy and pappy leave me.

Oklahoma Writers' Project
Ex-Slaves
[Date stamp: AUG 16 1937]

RED RICHARDSON
Age 75 yrs.
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

I was born July 21, 1862, at Grimes County, Texas. Smith Richardson
was my father's name, and Eliza Richardson my mother's. My father came
from Virginia. My mother she was born in Texas.

We lived in so many places round there I can't tell jest what, but we
lived in a log house most of the time. We slept on the flo' on pallets
on one quilt. We ate cornbread, beans, vegetables, and got to drink
plenty milk. We ate rabbits, fish, possums and such as that but we
didn't get no chicken. I don't have no fav'rite food, I don't guess.

We wore shirts, long shirts slit up the side. I didn't know what pants
was until I was 14. In Grimes County it ain't even cold these days,
and I never wore no shoes. I married in a suit made of broad cloth. It
had a tail on the coat.

Master Ben Hadley, and Mistress Minnie Hadley, they had three sons:
Josh, Henry and Charley. Didn't have no overseer. We had to call all
white folks, poor or rich, Mr. Master and Mistress. Master Hadley
owned 'bout 2,000 acres. He had a big number of slaves. They used to
wake 'em up early in the mornings by ringing a large bel