If we told him we had been learnin' to read,
he would near beat the daylights out of us--after gettin' somebody to
teach us; I think he did some of that so that the other owners wouldn't
say he was spoilin' his slaves."

"He was funny about us marryin', too. He would let us go a-courtin' on
the other plantations near anytime we liked, if we were good, and if we
found somebody we wanted to marry, and she was on a plantation that
b'longed to one of his kin folks or a friend, he would swap a slave so
that the husband and wife could be together. Sometimes, when he couldn't
do this, he would let a slave work all day on his plantation, and live
with his wife at night on her plantation. Some of the other owners was
always talking about his spoilin' us."

"He wasn't a Dimmacrat like the rest of 'em in the county; he belonged
to the 'know-nothin' party' and he was a real leader in it. He used to
always be makin' speeches, and sometimes his best friends wouldn't be
speaking to him for days at a time."

"Mr. Tabb was always specially good to me. He used to let me go all
about--I guess he had to; couldn't get too much work out of me even when
he kept me right under his eyes. I learned fast, too, and I think he
kinda liked that. He used to call Sandy Davis, the slave who taught me,
'the smartest Nigger in Kentucky.'

"It was 'cause he used to let me go around in the day and night so much
that I came to be the one who carried the runnin' away slaves over the
river. It was funny the way I started it too."

"I didn't have no idea of ever gettin' mixed up in any sort of business
like that until one special night. I hadn't even thought of rowing
across the river myself."

"But one night I had gone on another plantation 'courtin,' and the old
woman whose house I went to told me she had a real pretty girl there who
wanted to go across the river and would I take her? I was scared and
backed out in a hurry. But then I saw the girl, and she was such a
pretty little thing, brown-skinned and kinda rosy, and looking as scared
as I was feelin', so it wasn't long before I was listenin' to the old
woman tell me when to take her and where to leave her on the other
side."

"I didn't have nerve enough to do it that night, though, and I told them
to wait for me until tomorrow night. All the next day I kept seeing
Mister Tabb laying a rawhide across my back, or shootin' me, and kept
seeing that scared little brown girl back at the house, lookin