told him, 'You are just
as free as we are.' I was born after the Emancipation proclamation. The
proclamation was issued in September and I was born in October. It
didn't become effective till January first. So I was born a slave any
way you take it.

"The farm my father worked on was on the Pearl River. It was very
fertile. It was in Mississippi. A very big road runs beside the farm.
The road is called the Big Road. The nigger quarters were across the
road on the south side.

"My mother's folks treated her nicely too. Mr. Rankins didn't have any
slaves but Mrs. Rankins had some. Her people gave them to her. My
grandma who belonged to her had twenty-six children. She got her start
off of the slaves her parents gave her, and finally she had about
seventy-five. She ran a farm. My mother's work was house woman. She
worked in the house. Her mistress was good to her. The overseer couldn't
whip the niggers, except in her presence, so that she could see that it
wasn't brutal. She didn't allow the women to be whipped at all. When an
overseer got rough, she would fire him. Slaves would run away sometimes
and stay in the woods if they thought that they would get a whipping for
it. But she would send word for them to come on back and they wouldn't
be whipped. And she would keep her word about it. The slaves on her
place were treated so good that they were called free niggers by the
other white people. When they were whipped, they would go to the woods.

"I have heard them speak of the pateroles often. They had to get a pass
and then the pateroles wouldn't bother them. They would whip you and
beat you if you didn't have a pass. Slavery was an awful low thing. It
was a bad system. You had to get a pass to go to see your wife. If you
didn't have that pass, they would whip you. The pateroles carried on
their work for a good while after slavery was over, and the Civil War
had ended.

"I was pretty good when I was a boy. So I never had any trouble then. I
was right smart size when I saw the Ku Klux. They would whip men and
women that weren't married and were living together. On the first day of
January, they would whip men and boys that didn't have a job. They kept
the Negroes from voting. They would whip them. They put up notices, 'No
niggers to come out to the polls tomorrow.' They would run them off of
government land which they had homesteaded. Sometimes they would just
persuade them not to vote. A Negro like my father, they wou