lysian Fields Road, nine miles south of
Marshall, Texas. Katie was a nurse and housegirl in the McCarty
household until five years after the end of the Civil War. She then
moved to Marshall and married. Her husband and her three children
are dead and she is supported by Griffin Williams, a boy she found
homeless and reared. They live in a neat three-room shack in Sunny
South addition of Marshall, Texas.

"You is talkin' now to a nigger what nussed seven white chillen in them
bullwhip days. Miss Stella, my young missy, got all our ages down in she
Bible, and it say I's born in 1849. Massa Bill McCarty my massa and he
live east and south of Marshall, clost to the Louisiana line. Me and my
three brudders, Peter and Adam and Willie, all lives to be growed and
married, but mammy die in slavery and pappy run 'way while he and Massa
Bill on they way to the battle of Mansfield. Massa say when he come back
from the war, 'That triflin' nigger run 'way and jines up with them damn
Yankees.'

"Massa have six chillen when war come on and I nussed all of 'em. I
stays in the house with 'em and slep' on a pallet on the floor, and soon
I's big 'nough to tote the milk pail they puts me to milkin', too. Massa
have more'n 100 cows and most the time me and Violet do all the milkin'.
We better be in that cowpen by five o'clock. One mornin' massa cotched
me lettin' one the calves do some milkin' and he let me off without
whippin' that time, but that don't mean he allus good, 'cause them cows
have more feelin' for than massa and missy.

"We et peas and greens and collards and middlin's. Niggers had better
let that ham alone! We have meal coffee. They parch meal in the oven and
bile it and drink the liquor. Sometime we gits some of the Lincoln
coffee what was lef' from the nex' plantation.

"When the niggers done anything massa bullwhip them, but didn't skin
them up very often. He'd whip the man for half doin' the plowin' or
hoein' but if they done it right he'd find something else to whip them
for. At night the men had to shuck corn and the women card and spin. Us
got two pieces of clothes for winter and two for summer, but us have no
shoes. We had to work Saturday all day and if that grass was in the
field we didn't git no Sunday, either.

"They have dances and parties for the white folks' chillen, but missy
say, 'Niggers was made to work for white folks,' and on Christmas Miss
Irene bakes two cakes for the