“The first clear thing I remember was when everybody was rejoicing because they were free. The soldiers were playing and boxing and chucking watermelons at one another. They had great long guns called muskets. I heard ’em say that Abraham Lincoln had turned ’em loose. Where I was at, they turned ’em loose in ’63. Lincoln was assassinated in ’65. I heard that the morning after it was done. We was turned loose long before then.
“I was too young to pay much attention, but they were cutting up and clapping their hands and carrying on something terrible, and shouting, ‘Free, free, old Abraham done turned us loose.’
“I was here in them days! Heard those long toms roar! General Grant shelling the Rebels!”
Patrollers
“I don’t remember much about the patrollers except that when they been having dances, and some of them didn’t have passes, they’d get chased and run. If they would get catched, them that didn’t have passes would get whipped. Them that had them, they were all right.”
Amusements
“They had barbecues. That’s where the barbecues started from, I reckon, from the barbecues among the slaves.
“They would have corn shuckings. They would have a whole lot of corn to shuck, and they would give the corn shucking and the barbecue together. They would shuck as many as three or four hundred bushels of corn in a night. Sometimes, they would race one another. So you know that they must have been some shucking done.
“I don’t believe that I know of anything else. People were ignorant in those days and didn’t have many amusements.”