sh her. He took her away and was kind
to her, but he decided she was too young to breed and he sold her to
another Creek who had several slaves already, and he brought her out
to the Territory.

The McIntosh men was the leaders in the bunch that come out at that
time, and one of the bunch, named Jim Perryman, bought my mammy and
married her to one of his "boys", but after he waited a while and she
didn't have a baby he decided she was no good breeder and he sold her
to Mose Perryman.

Mose Perryman was my master, and he was a cousin to Legus Perryman,
who was a big man in the Tribe. He was a lot younger than Mose, and
laughed at Mose for buying my mammy, but he got fooled, because my
mammy got married to Mose's slave boy Jacob, the way the slaves was
married them days, and went ahead and had ten children for Mr. Mose.

Mose Perryman owned my pappy and his older brother, Hector, and one of
the McIntosh men, Oona, I think his name was, owned my pappy's brother
William. I can remember when I first heard about there was going to be
a war. The older children would talk about it, but they didn't say it
was a war all over the country. They would talk about a war going to
be "back in Alabama", and I guess they had heard the Creeks talking
about it that way.

When I was born we lived in the Choska bottoms, and Mr. Mose Perryman
had a lot of land broke in all up and down the Arkansas river along
there. After the War, when I had got to be a young woman, there was
quite a settlement grew up at Choska (pronounced Choe-skey) right
across the river east of where Haskell now is, but when I was a child
before the War all the whole bottoms was marshy kind of wilderness
except where farms had been cleared out. The land was very rich, and
the Creeks who got to settle there were lucky. They always had big
crops. All west of us was high ground, toward Gibson station and Fort
Gibson, and the land was sandy. Some of the McIntoshes lived over that
way, and my Uncle William belonged to one of them.

We slaves didn't have a hard time at all before the War. I have had
people who were slaves of white folks back in the old states tell me
that they had to work awfully hard and their masters were cruel to
them sometimes, but all the Negroes I knew who belonged to Creeks
always had plenty of clothes and lots to eat and we all lived in good
log cabins we built. We worked the farm and tended to the horses and
cattle and hogs, and some of the older