d pressing men into service. Finally
once, they caught him but they let him go. I don't know how he got
away.

"I can remember he said once they got after him and there was a white
man and his family living in the house. He rented a room from the
white man. That was in Nashville. These pateroles or whatever they was
got after him and claimed they were coming to get him, and the old man
and the old woman he stayed with took him upstairs and said they would
protect him if the pateroles came back. I don't know whether they came
back or not, but they never got him.

"My father supported himself and his family in Nashville by following
his trade. He seems to have gotten along all right. He never seemed to
have any trouble that I heard him speak of.

"I was born in 1867 in Nashville, Tennessee, about half a block from
the old Central Tennessee College[G]. I think it became Walden
University later on, and I think that it's out now. That's an old
school. My oldest sister was graduated from it. I could have been if I
hadn't taken up the married notion.

"I got part of my schooling in Nashville and part here. When I left
Nashville, I was only a child nine years old. I only went to school
four sessions after we came out here. I didn't like out here. I wanted
to stay back home. My father came out here because he had heard that
he could make more money with his trade here than he could in
Nashville, which he did. He was shoeing horses and building wagons and
so on. Just in this blacksmithing and carpenter work.

"I wanted to learn that. I would stay 'round the shop and help him
shoe horses. But they wouldn't let me take it up. I got so I could do
carpenter work pretty good. First I learned how to make a box
square--that is a hard job when a person doesn't know much.

"I never heard my father say anything about the food the slaves ate. I
have heard him talk about the good times they had around hog killing.
His master raised sweet potatoes and corn and wheat and things like
that. I guess they ate just about what they raised.

"My father never was a sharecropper. He knew nothing of rural work
except the mechanical side of it. He could make or do anything that
was needed in fixing up something to do farm work with. I have seen
him make and sharpen plows. The first cotton stalk cutter that was
made within ten miles of here was made by my father. The people 'round
here were knocking off cotton stalks with sticks until my father be