ll to the second son,
Col. M.R. Singleton.

Mother never was sold, but her parents were; they were owned by one Mr.
Crough, who sold them and the rest of the slaves, with the plantation,
to Col. Dick Singleton, upon whose place mother was born. I was born on
this extensive plantation, twenty-eight miles southeast of Columbia,
South Carolina, in the year 1849. I belonged to Col. M.R. Singleton, and
was held in slavery up to the time of the emancipation proclamation
issued by President Lincoln.

THE CHILDREN.

My father had fifteen children: four boys and three girls by his first
wife and eight by his second. Their names were as follows: of the
boys--Toney, Aszerine, Duke and Dezine; of the girls--Violet, Priscilla,
and Lydia. Those of his second wife were as follows: Footy, Embrus,
Caleb, Mitchell, Cuffey and Jacob, and of the girls, Catherine and
Retta.

SAND HILL DAYS.

Col. M.R. Singleton was like many other rich slave owners in the South,
who had summer seats four, six or eight miles from the plantation, where
they carried the little negro boys and girls too small to work.

Our summer seat, or the sand hill, as the slaves used to call it, was
four miles from the plantation. Among the four hundred and sixty-five
slaves owned by the colonel there were a great many children. If my
readers had visited Col. Singleton's plantation the last of May or the
first of June in the days of slavery, they would have seen three or four
large plantation wagons loaded with little negroes of both sexes, of
various complexions and conditions, who were being carried to this
summer residence, and among them they would have found the author of
this little work in his sand-hill days.

My readers would naturally ask how many seasons these children were
taken to the summer seats? I answer, until, in the judgment of the
overseer, they were large enough to work; then they were kept at the
plantation. How were they fed? There were three or four women who were
too old to work on the plantation who were sent as nurses to the summer
seats with the children; they did the cooking. The way in which these
old women cooked for 80, and sometimes 150 children, in my sand-hill
days, was this:--they had two or three large pots, which held about a
bushel each, in which they used to cook corn flour, stirred with large
wooden paddles. The food was dealt out with the paddles into each
child's little wooden tray or tin pail, which was furnished by th