rk, although he was supposed to help. He furnished money to
"run" us at fifteen to a hundred per cent, according to the time of the
year. He grew wealthier; we grew, if possible, poorer. Before I was
fifteen years old I instinctively felt the injustice of the scheme. When
the crop was divided he got three loads of corn to our one, and somehow
he always got all the cotton: never did a single bale come to us.

Those were hard times for us; for it must be remembered that this was in
the days of reconstruction and the Ku-Klux-Klan, and if to this be added
the fact that my father, a young and inexperienced man, had started out
with a family of six on his hands, some idea of the situation may be
had. I can recall having been without food many a day, and the pangs of
hunger drove me almost to desperation. But mother and father would come
late at night from a day of depressing toil and excruciating inward
pain, the result of their inability to relieve our suffering, and pacify
us for the night with such things as they had been able to get. When I
awoke the next morning they were gone again on a food mission.

Hunger would sometimes nearly drive us mad. My brother and I were given
a meal of pie-crusts from the white folks' table one day, and as we ate
them, Old Buck, the family dog, who resembled an emaciated panther,
stole one of the crusts. It was our dinner. We loved Old Buck, but we
had to live first; so my brother lit on him, and a battle royal took
place over that crust. Brother was losing ground, so I joined in, and,
coming up from the rear, we conquered and saved the crust, but not till
both of us were well scratched and bitten.

I was put to school at the age of six. Both mother and father were
determined that their children should be educated. School lasted two
months in the year--July and August. The schoolhouse was three miles
from our house, but we walked every day, my oldest sister carrying me
astride her neck when I gave out. Sometimes we had an ear of roasted
green corn in our basket for dinner, or a roasted sweet potato, but more
often simply persimmons, or fruit and nuts picked from our landlord's
orchard and from the forest.

When cotton began to open, in the latter part of August, the landlord
wanted us to stop school and pick cotton, and I can distinctly remember
how my mother used to outgeneral him by slipping me off to school
through the woods, following me through the swamps and dark places, with
her h