e could really care
for, decided to allow one of my brothers, who was perhaps a year and a
half younger than I, and myself, to live with him and his second wife.

My grandfather was quite seventy-five years of age when we went to live
with him, and was too feeble to work. He was supported from the
poor-house, which gave him a peck of meal, 2-1/2 pounds of bacon, 1
pound of coffee, 1 pound of brown sugar, and once a month 25 cents'
worth of flour. That, together with the little his wife could earn from
place to place, constituted the "rations" of all of us for a week.

Of my birth no record was kept, my mother having been a slave. All I
have been able to learn of the date of my birth is what my mother
remembers connected with the close of slavery. In trying to ascertain
from her when I was born, she said, "You was born some time just after
Christmas, in the month of January, the third year after the surrender."

My mother had twelve children. I was the eighth child and the second one
born after slavery. All except two of the children were born in the same
one-room log cabin with a dirt floor, in the town of Paulding, Jasper
County, Miss. My mother did the cooking for her master's family and the
plantation help, did all of the milking, and was also washer-woman.

In the summer of 1896 I again visited Paulding, just after graduating
from Tuskegee. I had to go there to move my aged mother to more
comfortable quarters. She was quite ill, and died soon after I reached
Florida with her. When I went to Paulding I measured the house in which
I was born, and found it to be 9 feet wide, 17 feet long, 7 feet high,
with no windows, with but one door, and a dirt chimney. The furnishing
as I remember it was composed of a chair, a stool, a table, and my
mother's bed, which was constructed in one corner of the house. The bed
was made by putting a post in the ground and nailing two pieces of wood
to the wall from this post, then by putting in a floor, making something
like a box to hold the bedding. The children slept in a similarly
constructed place, except that the mattress was on the ground and was
filled with straw. Our bedding, for the most part, was what wearing
apparel we possessed thrown over us at night. Outside the house was a
long bench, which was kept for the accommodation of visitors.

A peculiar incident in our home life happened one Sunday morning in
March--one Easter Sunday. All of the smaller children were seated on t