Pateroles
“The pateroles were for Niggers just like police and sheriffs were for white folks. They were just poor white folks. When a Nigger was out from the plantation at night, he had to have a pass. If the pateroles seen him, they would stop him and ask for his pass. If’n he didn’t have it, he’d mos’ likely get a beating. I was free and didn’t have no pass. Sometimes they would stop me, but I never had no trouble with ’em. I was a boy then, and everybody knowed me.”
Good Masters
“Men like Colonel Troutman, Major Holmes, and Preacher Russell—Thomas Russell—they didn’t whip their Niggers and didn’t allow no one else to whip them. They had a little guardhouse on the plantation and they would lock them up in it. You’d better not hit one of their Niggers. They’d take a pole or something and run you ragged.”
Mean Masters
“White folks was cruel in slavery times. You see I was free and could go where I wanted too, and I see’d a lot. Old Myer Green would take a Nigger and tie his feet to one side of a railroad track and tie his hands to the other side, and whip him till the blood ran. Then he would take him down to the smoke house and rub him down with lard and red pepper. ‘Rub plenty in,’ he would say, ‘Don’t let him spoil.’
“Then I have seen them take up a ten-rail fence end set it down on a Nigger’s neck and whip him. If he would rare and twist and try to jump up, he would break his neck.
To follow 1st. par, [P.7]
Pateroles (See also on [Page 9])
“One night, when me and my mother was coming from town, my mother had a demijohn of whiskey. They (pateroles) tried to take it. And she snatched a palling off the fence and nearly beat them poor white trash to death. My mother was a good woman, strong as any man. I was sitting on the demijohn. I was a little fellow then. They didn’t do nothin’ to her neither, ’cause they knew what old Colonel Troutman would do.” (Holloway’s mother was midwife to Colonel Troutman’s wife and nurse and ‘mammy’ to his boy, although a free Indian.)