re in time of harvest.
He lived in Lexington the rest of the time. He told his people, 'When
I die, bury me in a bale of cotton.' One time he got sick and they
thought he would die. They gathered all the hands up and all the
people about the place. There was about three hundred. He come to his
senses and said, 'What's all these people doing here?'

"His son said, 'Papa, they thought you was goin' to die and they come
up to see you.'

"And he said to his son, 'Well, I ain't dead yet. Tell 'em to git back
on the job, and chop that cotton.'

"I did not have any work to do in slavery time. When the War ended I
was only five years old. But I played the devil after the War though.
When the slaves were freed, I shouted, but I ain't got nothin' yet. I
learned a lot though. My father used to make a plow or a harrow. They
made cotton in those days. Potatoes ain't no 'count now. In them days,
they made potatoes so good and sweet that they would gum up your
hands. Mothers used to make good old ash cakes. Used to have
pot-liquor with grease standin' up on it. People don't know nothin'
now. Don't know how to cook.

"My father's name was Joe Love and my mother's name was Sophia. I
don't know any of my grandparents. All of them belonged to old Joe
Love. I never did know any of them. I know my father and mother--my
mammy and pappy--that's what we called 'em in them days.

"Old man Joe would go out sometimes and come in with a hog way in the
night. He was a cooper--made water buckets, pans to make bread up in
and things like that. Mammy would make us git up in the night and
clean our mouths. If they didn't, children would laugh at them the
next day and say the spiders had been biting your mouth, 'cause we
were sposed to had so much grease on our mouths that the spiders would
swing down and bite them.

"I professed religion when I was sixteen years old. It was down in the
Free Nigger Bend where my father had bought a little place on the
public road between Greenwood and Shellmount.

"I married that fall. My father had died and I had got to be a man.
Done better then than I do since I got old. I had one cow and my
mother let me have another. I made enough money to buy a pair of mules
and a wagon. My wife was willing to work. She would go out and git
some poke greens and pepper and things and cook them with a little
butter. Night would come, we'd go out and cut a cord of wood. Got
'long better then than people do now.

"I began p