now you
ain't done nothin' nor your child neither, but I'll have to hit you a
few light licks to satisfy ma.'

"Blount come the next day and went down to where pa was making shoes. He
said, 'Daniel, you're looking mighty glum.'

"Pa said, 'You'd be lookin' glum too if your wife and chile had done
been beat up for nothin'.'

"When he said that, Blount got mad. He snatched up a shoe hammer and hit
pa up side the head with it.

"Pa said, 'By God, don't you try it again.'

"Blount didn't hit him again. Pa was ready to fight, and he wasn't sure
that he could whip him. Pa said, 'You won't hit me no more.' The war was
goin' on then.

Runaways

"The following Sunday night, twelve head of 'em left there. My ma and
pa and me and our whole family and some more besides was along. We went
from the plantation to Rodney, Mississippi first, trying to get on a
steamboat--gunboat. The gunboat wouldn't take us for fear we would get
hurt. The war was goin' on then. So we just transferred down the river
and went on to Natchez. We went there walking and wading. We was from
Sunday night to Sunday night gettin' there. We didn't have no trouble
'sept that the hounds ms runnin' us. But they didn't catch us--they
didn't catch none of us. My ma and my pa and my brothers and sisters
besides me was all in the crowd; and we all got to Natchez.

"They are all dead and gone to Judgment now but me. I think that I got
one sister in Chicago, Illinois. She is my baby sister. I ain't never
heard nothing about her bein' dead.

Natchez

"At Natchez, ma didn't do anything. We children didn't do nothin' either
there. But pa joined the army. He joined it the next day after he got
there. Then I went to work waiting on the sixty-fourth--lemme see--yes,
it was the Sixty-Fourth Brass Epaulettes. I was waiting on one of the
sergeants. He was a Yankee sergeant. The sergeant's name was Josephus,
and the captain of the Company was Lieutenant Knowles. I was with them
two years and six months. I never did get hurt. When they went to fight
at New Orleans, the captain wouldn't lemme take part in it. He said that
I was so brave he was a 'fraid I might get hurt.

"Me and my father were the only ones working in the family at that time.
I stayed right in Natchez but my father didn't. My father's first stop
was in Bullocks Bar right above Vidalia. That was where his company was
stationed first. Lemme see, he went from there to Davis Bend. I wasn't
with them. H