Washington and shipped to New Orleans. We stayed in
the 'Nigger Traders Yard' there about three months. But we was not to
be sold. Master Cupps [Culps?] owned father, mother and all of us. If
they gained the victory he was to take us back to Virginia. I never
knowed my grandparents. The yard had a tall brick wall around it. We
had a bunk room, good cotton pads to sleep on and blankets. On one
side they had a wall fixed to go up on from the inside and twelve
platforms. You could see them being sold on the inside and the crowd
on the outside. When they auctioned them off they would come, pick out
what they wanted to sell next and fill them blocks again. They sold
niggers all day long. They come in another drove they had, had men out
buying over the country. They come in thick wood doors with iron nails
bradded through, fastened on big hinges, fastened it with chains and
iron bars. The house was a big red brick house. We didn't get none too
much to eat at that place. I reckon one side was three hundred yard
long of the wall and the house was that long. Some of them in there
cut their hands off with a knife or ax. Well, they couldn't sell
them. Nobody would buy them. I don't know what they ever done with
them. Plenty of them would cut their hand off if they could get
something to cut with to keep from being sold.

"We stayed in that place till Wyley Lions [Lyons?] come and got us in
wagons. He kept us for Master Cupps. Mother was a house girl in
Virginia. She was one more good cook. I started hoeing and picking
cotton in Virginia for master. When I was fourteen years old I done
the same in Mississippi with Wiley Lyons in Mississippi close to
Canton. In Canton, Mississippi Wiley Lyons had the biggest finest
brick house in that country. He had two farms. In Bolivar County was
the biggest. I could hear big shooting from Canton fifteen miles away.
He wasn't mean and he didn't allow the overseers to be mean.

"Hilliard Christmas [a neighbor] was mean to his folks. My father
hired his own time. He raised several ten acre gardens and
watermelons. He paid Mr. Cupp in Virginia. He come to see our folks
how they was getting along.

"A Negro on a joining farm run off. They hunted him with the dogs and
they found him at a log. Heap his legs froze, so the white doctor had
to cut them off. He was on Solomon's farms. After that he got to be a
cooper. He made barrels and baskets--things he could do sittin' in his
chair. They picked him