d call, ARE YOU UP, and everybody know it was
four o'clock and pour out of the cabins ready for the chores.

Sometimes the white folks go around the slave quarters for the night.
Not on the Davenport plantation, but some others close around. The
slaves talked about it amongst themselves.

After a while they'd be a new baby. Yellow. When the child got old
enough for chore work the master would sell him (or her). No
difference was it his own flesh and blood--if the price was right!

I traffic with lots of the women, but never marries. Not even when I
was free after the War. I sees too many married troubles to mess up
with such doings!

Sometimes the master sent me alone to the grinding mill. Load in the
yellow corn, hitch in the oxen, I was ready to go. I gets me fixed up
with a pass and takes to the road.

That was the trip I like best. On the way was a still. Off in the
bresh. If the still was lonely I stop, not on the way to but on the
way back. Mighty good whiskey, too! Maybe I drinks too much, then I
was sorry.

Not that I swipe the whiskey, just sorry because I gets sick! Then I
figures a woods camp meeting will steady me up and I goes.

The preacher meet me and want to know how is my feelings. I says I is
low with the misery and he say to join up with the Lord.

I never join because he don't talk about the Lord. Just about the
Master and Mistress. How the slaves must obey around the
plantation--how the white folks know what is good for the slaves.
Nothing about obeying the Lord and working for him.

I reckon the old preacher was worrying more about the bull whip than
he was the Bible, else he say something about the Lord! But I always
obeys the Lord--that's why I is still living!

The slaves would pray for to get out of bondage. Some of them say the
Lord told them to run away. Get to the North. Cross the Red River.
Over there would be folks to guide them to the Free State (Kansas).

The Lord never tell me to run away. I never tried it, maybe, because
mostly they was caught by patrollers and fetched back for a
flogging--and I had whippings enough already!

Before the Civil War was the fighting with Mexico. Some of the troops
on they way south passed on the Military Road. Wasn't any fighting
around Linden or Jefferson during the time.

They was lots of traveling on the Military Road. Most of the time you
could see covered wagons pulled by mules and horses, and sometimes a
crawling string of wagons wit