d in her", and then laugh.

Young Mister Ned was a devil, too. When his mammy died he went out and
"blanket married." I mean he brung in a half white and half Indian
woman and just lived with her.

The slaves would get rations every Monday morning to do them all week.
The Overseer would weigh and measure according to how many in the
family, and if you run out you just starve till you get some more. We
all know the overseer steal some of it for his own self but we can't
do anything, so we get it from the old Master some other way.

One day I was carrying water from the spring and I run up on
Grandmammy and Uncle Nick skinning a cow. "What you-all doing?", I
say, and they say keep my mouth shut or they kill me. They was
stealing from the Master to piece out down at the quarters with. Old
Master had so many cows he never did count the difference.

I guess I wasn't any worse than any the rest of the Negroes, but I was
bad to tell little lies. I carry scars on my legs to this day where
Old Master whip me for lying, with a rawhide quirt he carry all the
time for his horse. When I lie to him he just jump down off'n his
horse and whip me good right there.

In slavery days we all ate sweet potatoes all the time. When they
didn't measure out enough of the tame kind we would go out in the
woods and get the wild kind. They growed along the river sand betaween
where we lived and Wilson's Rock, out west of our place.

Then we had boiled sheep and goat, mostly goat, and milk and wild
greens and corn pone. I think the goat meat was the best, but I aint
had no teeth for forty years now, and a chunk of meat hurts my
stomach. So I just eats grits mostly. Besides hoeing in the field,
chopping sprouts, shearing sheep, carrying water, cutting firewood,
picking cotton and sewing I was the one they picked to work Mistress'
little garden where she raised things from seed they got in Fort
Smith. Green peas and beans and radishes and things like that. If we
raised a good garden she give me a little of it, and if we had a poor
one I got a little anyhow even when she didn't give it.

For clothes we had homespun cotton all the year round, but in winter
we had a sheep skin jacket with the wool left on the inside. Sometimes
sheep skin shoes with the wool on the inside and sometimes real cow
leather shoes with wood peggings for winter, but always barefooted in
summer, all the men and women too.

Lord, I never earned a dime of money in slave da