d a man Old Man Bibbs would say,
'Here's your money. Don't want you beating up my niggers so they can't
work. I don't need you.' He'd tell 'im quick he don't need him and he
can git. That's the kind of man he was. Wouldn't let you be mobbed up.
He was a good christian man. I'll give that to him. In the time of the
War when they was freeing slaves and I was a little old eight-year-old
kid, there was a little old Dutchman, a Tennessee man, he came out in
the country to get feed. Out there in Alabama.

"I was in Alabama then. The white woman that raised me had taken me
there. She had done married again and left me with mama awhile. While I
was little, that was. When I was about seven, she came and got me again
and carried me down in Alabama and raised me with her children. That
white woman never called me nothin' but baby as long as she lived. You
know she cared for me just like I was one of her's. When a person raise
a child from a month old she can't help from loving it.

"This Dutchman come and asked me where my parents was and I told him
they was in Mississippi. He slipped me away from my folks and carried me
to Decatur and they got cut off there. He was a Yankee soldier, and old
Forrest's army caught 'em and captured me and then carried me first
nearly to Nashville. They got in three miles of the town and couldn't
get no closer. They ran us so we never got no res' till we got to
Booneville, Mississippi. Then I sent word to Bibb and my uncle came up
and got me. Him and Billie Bibb, my young master. Billie Bibb was a
soldier too. He was home on a furlough. I was glad to see him because I
tell you in the army there was suffering. But I'll tell you I'll give
them credit, those Tennessee men took care of me just as though I was
their own. I was in a two mule wagon. I drove it. I was big enough to
drive. The ambulance man stopped in Nashville to see his folks and got a
furlough and went on home."

Work

"I learned how to work--work in the field. Wasn't nothing but field
work. I learned how to hoe first. But in Alabama I learned how to plow.
I didn't want to be no hoe man; I wanted to plow. When I went back to
Mississippi, they put me on the plow. I was just eight years old when I
learned to plow."

Share cropping

"Right after freedom, I just kept on plowing. We share cropped. My mama
and I would take a crop. She'd work. We'd all work like the devil until
I got a job and went to town. She was willing to let me go