salty earth
under their smoke houses, put water with it, drained it off and used it
to salt rations.

"There came stories that the Yankees had taken this place and that they
were marching through Georgia into South Carolina. They burned
Columbia, the Capitol of South Carolina, and had both whites and black
scared, they were so rough. The Yankees stole, burned, and plundered.
Mother said they hated South Carolina cause they started the war there.
They burned a lot of the farm houses. The army, so my father and mother
said, was stretched out over a distance of sixty-two miles. Jest think
of a scope of country sixty two miles wide with most of the buildings
burned, the stock killed, and nothing to eat. The southern army and the
northern army had marched back and forth through the territory until
there was nothing much left. Where Sherman's army stopped and ate and
fed their horses the Negroes went and picked up the grains of corn they
strowed there and parched and ate them. People also parched and ate
acorns in South Carolina.

"Father and mother got together after the war and they moved to a
widow lady's place by the name of Ann Hunter, near Ridgeway. She was
good to us and we stayed there sixteen years. Ann Hunter had three
sons, Abraham, George and Henry. Abraham went to South America on a
rambling trip. He decided to stay there. He was a young man then and he
married a Spaniard. When he came home to see his mother it was the year
of the earthquake in 1886. He was a grown man then and he brought his
wife and children with him. He had three children, all of them spoke
Spanish and could not understand their grandmother's talk to them. His
wife was a beautiful woman, dark with black hair and blue eyes. She
just worshipped her husband. They stayed over a month and then returned
to South America. I have never seen 'em since or had any straight news
of them.

"Mother and father lived on the farm until they died, with first one
ex-slave owner and another. They said they had nothing when the war
ended and that there was nothing to do.

"I stayed with my mother and father near Ridgeway until I was 21 years
of age. I left the farm then and went to work on the railroad. I
thought I was the only man then. I was so strong. I worked on the
railroad one year then I went to the Stone mountain Rock Quarry in
Georgia.

"I got my hand injured with a dynamite cap after I had worked there a
year and I came home again. I went back to