He was very poor. “I’ve got two hosses and a wagon, and I shouldn’t have them if Sherman hadn’t gin ’em tu me.” He held up his feet, and looked at his toes protruding through great gaps in his shoes. “I kain’t git money enough to buy me a new pair, to save my life.”
“I beat ye, then,” said the owner of the crippled horse, showing a very good pair of boots.
“You’re drayin’,” said Wade. “I haul. I’m gittin’ wood to the halves. The owner’s as strong an old secessioner as ever lived. I kain’t make but tu loads a day, and one’s mine, and one’s the feller’s; I give one load for t’ other. Takes me three loads to git a cord; I git a dollar and a half, and sometime tu, for a load. I’ve got one boy that helps,—he’s about as high as hand boy standin’ hander,” (yond’ boy standing yonder,)—pointing to a negro lad of fourteen.
I asked Wade how old he was. “I’m in my fifty-one year old,” he replied; “and thar’s eight on us in the family, and tu hosses.”
I inquired concerning education in his county. “Thar’s a heap o’ po’ men in Cobb that kain’t read nor write. I’m one. I never went to skule narry time, and I was alluz so tight run I never could send my chil’n, only ’tween crap time.”
“What do you mean by ‘’tween crap time’?”
“When I’d laid by my crap,” (that is, stopped hoeing it, as corn,) “till fodder pullin’. I alluz had to make a little cotton, to keep up. I could alluz rent land befo’e the wa’, by givin’ half to the owners,—them a pound o’ cotton, and me a pound o’ cotton; them a load and me a load. That’s tu much; but I kain’t git it for that now. You might as well try to git their eyes as their land.”
Wade’s theory of reconstruction was simple, and expressed in few words: “We should tuk the land, as we did the niggers, and split it, and gin part to the niggers and part to me and t’ other Union fellers. They ’d have had to submit to it, as they did to the niggers.” I also found the freedmen, who had gathered about us, unanimously of this opinion.
“Wade,” I said, “you’re a candid man: now tell me which you think will do the most work,—a white man, or a nigger?”
“The nigger,” said Wade, surprised at so simple a question.