massa
wouldn't let me have the woman I wanted.

"The overseer was a mean white man and one day he starts to whip a
nigger what am hoein' tobacco, and he whipped him so hard that nigger
grabs him and made him holler. Missie come out and made them turn loose
and massa whipped that nigger and put him in chains for a whole year.
Every night he had to be in jail and couldn't see his folks for that
whole year.

"I seed slaves sold, and they'd make them clean up good and grease their
hands and face, so they'd look real fat, and sell them off. Of course,
most the niggers didn't know their parents or what chillen was theirs.
The white folks didn't want them to git 'tached to each other.

"Missie read some Bible to us every Sunday mornin' and taught us to do
right and tell the truth. But some them niggers would go off without a
pass and the patterrollers would beat them up scand'lous.

"The fun was on Saturday night when massa 'lowed us to dance. There was
lots of banjo pickin' and tin pan beatin' and dancin', and everybody
would talk 'bout when they lived in Africa and done what they wanted.

"I worked for massa 'bout four years after freedom, 'cause he forced me
to, said he couldn't 'ford to let me go. His place was near ruint, the
fences burnt and the house would have been but it was rock. There was a
battle fought near his place and I taken missie to a hideout in the
mountains to where her father was, 'cause there was bullets flyin'
everywhere. When the war was over, massa come home and says, 'You son
of a gun, you's sposed to be free, but you ain't, 'cause I ain't gwine
give you freedom.' So, I goes on workin' for him till I gits the chance
to steal a hoss from him. The woman I wanted to marry, Govie, she 'cides
to come to Texas with me. Me and Govie, we rides that hoss most a
hundred miles, then we turned him a-loose and give him a scare back to
his house, and come on foot the rest the way to Texas.

"All we had to eat was what we could beg and sometimes we went three
days without a bite to eat. Sometimes we'd pick a few berries. When we
got cold we'd crawl in a breshpile and hug up close together to keep
warm. Once in awhile we'd come to a farmhouse and the man let us sleep
on cottonseed in his barn, but they was far and few between, 'cause they
wasn't many houses in the country them days like now.

"When we gits to Texas we gits married, but all they was to our weddin'
am we jus' 'grees to live together as man and