, but I never heard
from them or saw them after the war. I have been married twice. My first
wife was Sally Dillis Blaire and we were married in 1889. I got a
divorce a few years later and I don't know whatever became of her. My
second wife is still living. Her name was Kattie Belle Reed and I
married her in 1907. No, I never had any children.

I don't believe I had a bed when I was a slave as I don't remember any.
At home, after the war, my mother and father's bed was made of wood with
ropes stretched across with a straw tick on top. 'Us kids' slept under
this bed on a 'trundle' bed so that at night my mother could just reach
down and look after any one of us if we were sick or anything.

I was raised on ash cakes, yams and butter milk. These ash cakes were
small balls made of dough and my mother would rake the ashes out of the
fire place and lay these balls on the hot coals and then cover them over
with the ashes again. When they were done we would take 'em out, clean
off the ashes and eat them. We used to cook chicken by first cleaning
it, but leaving the feathers on, then cover it with clay and lay it in a
hole filled with hot coals. When it was done we would just knock off the
clay and the feathers would come off with it.

When I was a 'kid' I wore nothing but a 'three cornered rag' and my
mother made all my clothes as I grew older. No, the slaves never knew
what underwear was.

We didn't have any clocks to go by; we just went to work when it was
light enough and quit when it was too dark to see. When any slaves took
sick they called in a nigger mammy who used roots and herbs, that is,
unless they were bad sick, then the overseer would call a regular
doctor.

When some slave died no one quit work except relatives and they stopped
just long enough to go to the funeral. The coffins were made on the
plantation, these were just rough pine board boxes, and the bodies were
buried in the grave yard on the plantation.

The overseer on the Jefferson plantation, so my father told me, would
not allow the slaves to pray and I never saw a bible until after I came
north. This overseer was not a religious man and would whip a slave if
he found him praying.

The slaves were allowed to sing and dance but were not allowed to play
games, but we did play marbles and cards on the quiet. If we wandered
too far from the plantation we were chased and when they caught us they
put us in the stockade. Some of the slaves escaped and a