s I had working for
something to eat and roaming around after that. I don't know why I
never did try to git back up around Hazelhurst and hunt up my pappy
and mammy, but I reckon I was jest ignorant and didn't know how to go
about it. Anyways I never did see them no more.

In about three years or a little over I met Bryce Draper on a farm in
Mississippi and we was married. His mammy had had a harder time than I
had. She had five children by a man that belong to her master, Mr.
Bryce and already named one of the boys--that my husband--Bryce after
him, and then he take her in and sell her off away from all her
children!

One was jest a little baby, and the master give it laudanum, but it
didn't die, and he sold her off and lied and said she was a young girl
and didn't have no husband, 'cause the man what bought her said he
didn't want to buy no woman and take her away from a family. That new
master name was Draper.

The last year of the War Mr. Draper die, and his wife already dead,
and he give all his farm to his two slaves and set them free. One of
them slaves was my husband's mammy.

Then right away the whites come and robbed the place of every thing
they could haul off, and run his mammy and the other niggers off! Then
she went and found her boy, that was my husband, and he live with her
until she died, jest before we is married.

We lived in Mississippi a long time, and then we hear about how they
better to the Negroes up in the North, and we go up to Kansas, but
they ain't no better there, and we come down to Indian Territory in
the Creek Nation in 1898, jest as they getting in that Spanish War.

We leased a little farm from the Creek Nation for $15 an acre, but
when they give out the allotments we had to give it up. Then we rent
100 acres from some Indians close to Wagoner, and we farm it all with
my family. We had enough to do it too!

For children we had John and Joe, and Henry, and Jim and Robert and
Will that was big enough to work, and then the girls big enough was
Mary, Nellie, Izora, Dora, and the baby. Dora married Max Colbert. His
people belonged to the Colberts that had Colbert's Crossin' on the Red
River way before the War, and he was a freedman and got allotment.

I lives with Dora now, and we is all happy, and I don't like to talk
about the days of the slavery times, 'cause they never did mean
nothing to me but misery, from the time I was eight years old.

I never will forgive that white man