nearly to their waistses. Why--well you see sometimes it was muddy.
Did we raise rice--No, ma'am. We mostly raised corn and cotton, like
everybody else.

We lived near Natchez. No ma'am, I never see but one colored person
whipped. His name was Robert. They laid him down on his stomach to whip
him. Never did hear what he had done. Maybe he run off. They usually
whipped them for that. No ma'am. I was right. Mrs. Glover didn't let her
colored folks be whipped. Robert, you see, was Donovan's man. He didn't
belong to Mrs. Glover. Her folks never got whipped.

Maybe Robert run off. I don't know. The folks did one thing special to
keep them from running. They fastened a sort of yoke around they necks.
From it there run up a sort of piece and there was a bell on the top of
that. It was so high the folks who wore it couldn't reach the bell. But
if they run it would tinkle and folks could find them. I don't quite
know how it worked--I just slightly remembers.

No, ma'am, I was just sort of a little girl before the war. You might
say I was never a slave. Cause I didn't have to work. Mrs. Glover
wouldn't let me work in the field and I didn't have much work to do in
the house either. Mrs. Glover was an old widow woman, but she was shore
good. Miss Kate was her onliest child. Kate's daughter was named Mary.

Was I afraid of the soldiers? No ma'am. I wasn't.

Lots of them that came through were colored soldiers. I remember that
they wore long tailed coats. They had brass buttons on they coats. But
we had to move from Natchez.

First the soldiers run us off to Tennisaw Parish--an island there." (A
check on maps in the atlas of Encyclopedia Britannica reveals a Tenses
Parish, Louisiana--across the river and a few miles north of Natchez.)
"We couldn't even stay there. They drove us along, and finally we wound
up in Texas.

We wasn't there in Texas long when the soldiers marched in to tell us
that we was free. Seems to me like it was on a Monday morning when they
come in. Yes, it was a Monday. They went out to the field and told them
they was free. Marched them out of the fields. They come a'shouting. I
remembers one woman, she jumped up on a barrell and she shouted. She
jumped off and she shouted. She jumped back on again and shouted some
more. She kept that up for a long time, just jumping on a barrell and
back off again.

Yes ma'am, we children played. I remembers that the grown folks used to
have church--out behind an old sh