brother Middleton drove the police wagon: they
used to call it Black Maria.

"My father, Abram Brown, was the driver or head man at Rose plantation.
Dr. Rose thought a heap of him, and during the war he put some of his
fine furniture and other things he brought from England in my father's
house and told him if the Yankees came to say the things belonged to
him. Soon after that the soldiers came. They asked my father who the
things belonged to and he said they belonged to him. The soldiers asked
him who gave them to him, and he said his master gave them to him. The
Yankees told him that they thought he was lying, and if he didn't tell
the truth they would kill him, but he wouldn't say anything else so they
left him alone and went away.

"Work used to start on the plantation at four o'clock in the morning,
when the people went in the garden. At eight or nine o'clock they went
into the big fields. Everybody was given a task of work. When you
finished your task you could quit. If you didn't do your work right you
got a whipping.

"The babies were taken to the Negro house and the old women and young
colored girls who were big enough to lift them took care of them. At one
o'clock the babies were taken to the field to be nursed, then they were
brought back to the Negro house until the mothers finished their work,
then they would come for them.

"Dr. Rose gave me to his son, Dr. Arthur Barnwell Rose, for a Christmas
present. After the war Dr. Rose went back to England. He said he
couldn't stay in a country with so many free Negroes. Then his son Dr.
Arthur Barnwell Rose had the plantation. Those was good white people,
good white people.

"The colored people were given their rations once a week, on Monday,
they got corn, and a quart of molasses, and three pounds of bacon, and
sometimes meat and peas. They had all the vegetables they wanted; they
grew them in the gardens. When the boats first came in from Africa with
the slaves, a big pot of peas was cooked and the people ate it with
their hands right from the pot. The slaves on the plantation went to
meeting two nights a week and on Sunday they went to Church, where they
had a white preacher Dr. Rose hired to preach to them.

"After the war when we came back to Charleston I went to work as a
chimney-sweep. I was seven years old then. They paid me ten cents a
story. If a house had two stories I got twenty cents; if it had three
stories I got thirty cents. When I got too b