ick went to the North and never come home, and Grandmammy died
about that time.

We was way down across the Red river in Texas at that time, close to
Shawneetown of the Choctaw Nation but just across the river on the
other side in Texas bottoms. Old Master took us there in covered
wagons when the Yankee soldiers got too close by in the first part of
the War. He hired the slaves out to Texas people because he didn't
make any crops down there, and we all lived in kind of camps. That's
how some of the men and my uncle Nick got to slip off to the north
that way.

Old Master just rant and rave all the time we was in Texas. That's the
first time I ever saw a doctor. Before that when a slave sick the old
women give them herbs, but down there one day old Master whip a Negro
girl and she fall in the fire, and he had a doctor come out to fix her
up where she was burnt. I remember Granny giving me clabber milk when
I was sick, and when I was grown I found out it had had medicine in
it.

Before freedom we didn't have no church, but slipped around to the
other cabins and had a little singing sometimes. Couldn't have anybody
show us the letters either, and you better not let them catch you pick
up a book even to look at the pictures, for it was against a Cherokee
law to have a Negro read and write or to teach a Negro.

Some Negroes believed in buckeyes and charms but I never did. Old
Master had some good boys, named Aaron, John, Ned, Cy and Nat and they
told me the charms was no good. Their sister Nicie told me too, and
said when I was sick just come and tell her.

They didn't tell us anything about Christmas and New Year though, and
all we done was work.

When the War was ended we was still in Texas, and when old Master got
a letter from Fort Smith telling him the slaves was free he couldn't
read, and Young Miss read it to him. He went wild and jumped on her
and beat the devil out of her. Said she was lying to him. It near
about killed him to let us loose, but he cooled down after awhile and
said he would help us all get back home if we wanted to come.

Mammy told him she could bear her own expenses. I remember I didn't
know what "expenses" was, and I thought it was something I was going
to have to help carry all the way back.

It was a long time after he knew we was free before he told us. He
tried to keep us, I reckon, but had to let us go. He died pretty soon
after he told us, and some said his heart just broke and some