died and my father
married again. My stepmother had other children and they kept me out of
my education. Since I have been grown, I have gotten a little training
here and there. Still I have served as supervisor of elections and done
other things that they wanted educated people to do. But it was just
merely a pick-up of my own. The first teachers I had were white women
from the North."

Politics

"I have never taken a great deal of interest in politics. Only in the
neighborhood where I lived there was a colony of colored people at
Bentley, South Carolina. They chose me to represent them at the polls
and I did the best I could. I got great credit for both the colored and
the white people for that. But I never took much interest in politics.

"My father spent a fortune in it but I never could see that it benefited
him. I never did care for any kind of office except a mail contract that
I had once to haul mail. I went through that successfully and never lost
a pouch or anything but at the end of the year I throwed it up. I
couldn't trust anyone else to handle it for me and I had to meet trains
at all hours. The longest I could sleep was two or three hours a night,
so I gave it up at the end of the year."

Care of Old People

"Some of the masters treated us worse than dogs and others treated us
fine. Colonel Robert Willingham freed his slaves but his sisters and
brothers wouldn't stand for it. They went and stole us off and sold us.
My mother being a thrifty colored woman and a practical nurse,
everywhere she went, a case gave thirty dollars and her board and mine.
My father paid his master three hundred dollars a year. He built these
gin houses and presses. The old man would write him passes and
everything and see that he was paid for his work. Some years, he would
make as much as three or four thousand dollars. His master collected it
and held it for him and gave it to him when he wanted it. That was
during slavery times."

Opinion of the Present

"Slavery days were hard but in the same time the colored people fared
better than now because the white folks taken up for them and they
raised what they needed to eat. You couldn't go nowhere but what people
had plenty to eat. Now they can't do it.

"I know what caused it too. The Jews didn't have much privilege till
after the Negro was emancipated. They used to kill Jews and bury them in
the woods. But after emancipation, he began to rise. First he began to