ion and lived there three or four
years. That was almost the center of things, and we held church there.
All of the colored people would gather there. The colored people who had
been in the North were better educated than the people in the South.
They would come down to the South and help the rest of us. The white
people would also try to promote religion among the colored people. Our
church was a big log cabin. We lived in it, but we moved from one of the
large rooms into a small one, so we could have church. I remember one
time after we had been down on the creek bank fishing, that was what we
always did on Sunday, because we didn't know any better, my master
called us boys and told us we should go to Sunday school instead of
going fishing. I remember that to this day, and I have only been
fishing one or two times since. Then I didn't know what he was talking
about, but two or three years later I learned what Sunday school was,
and I started to go."

"I went to a subscription school. We would all pay a man to come to
teach us. I used to work for my room and board on Saturday's, and go to
school five days a week. That would have been all right, if I had kept
it up, but I didn't for very long, I learned to read and write pretty
good though. There were no Government school then that were free."

"We didn't have a name. The slaves were always known by the master's
last name, and after we were freed we just took the last name of our
masters and used it. After we had got our freedom papers, they had our
ages and all on them, they were lost so we guess at our ages."

"Most of the slave owners were good to their slaves although some of
them were brutish of course."

"In 1877 a lot of people began coming out here to Kansas, and in 1878
there were several, but in 1879 there were an awful lot of colored
people immigrating. We came in 1877 to Kansas City, October 1. We landed
about midnight. We came by train. Then there was nothing but little huts
in the bottoms. The Santa Fe depot didn't amount to anything. The
Armours' Packing house was even smaller than that. There was a swinging
bridge over the river. The Kaw Valley was considered good-for-nothing,
but to raise hemp. There was an awful lot of it grown there though, and
there were also beavers in the Kaw River, and they used to cut down
trees to build their dams. I worked several years and in 1880 I came to
Franklin County."

"We raised a lot of corn, and castor beans. Th