come and
scour for me; come by the store and get a package of soda; then come
through the field and drive the turkeys home." Providence never favored
any one more than it did me on that day. I went by the store and told
them to do up the soda, I went by and told 'Vina that she was wanted,
but I did not drive the turkeys home.

I started out in search of my mother, and after walking more than half
the distance I overtook an ox-team, and the driver allowed me to ride a
part of the way. I reached the railroad town about night, and standing
there was a freight train of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad.

I was never so frightened in all my life as when the whistle blew and
this object moved away. I remember asking the driver of the ox-team
where the thing's eyes were, and where the horses were that pulled it.

The doctor, suspecting that I had gone to Enterprise in search of my
mother, made plans to capture me and have me returned, but all of this
failed. By good fortune I found my brother, who was married and living
in this town; here again I became a nurse, having to care for his two
children.

Afterward I went to live with a white family which was very kind to me.
The young man who carried me to his house as a nurse put into my hands,
after I had been there some months, the first spelling-book I had ever
had; saying to me that if I would stay with them for two years, he would
at the end of that time send me to school. I stayed at this place for
some months, when my mother came from somewhere, I know not where, and
with five of the boys we joined ourselves together to work on a
plantation on "halves." We worked very hard that year.

Our food was furnished by the owner of the plantation. On many of those
long, cold days, for all day, we had only a "pone" of corn bread. At the
close of the year, after the owner had taken his half, and on account of
bad management on the part of an older brother who had charge of
affairs, my mother and her younger children received nothing for the
year's work, and this, notwithstanding the fact that we made five and
one-half bales of cotton and a large quantity of corn and peas. I
received as my "salary" for the year's work one shirt worth thirty cents
and a pair of suspenders worth about fifteen cents. I resolved to run
away again. This trip was made at night, on foot, over newly laid
railroad-ties, for a distance of seventeen miles.

I reached Meridian, Miss., at a late hour of the night