“This Dutchman come and asked me where my parents was and I told him they was in Mississippi. He slipped me away from my folks and carried me to Decatur and they got cut off there. He was a Yankee soldier, and old Forrest’s army caught ’em and captured me and then carried me first nearly to Nashville. They got in three miles of the town and couldn’t get no closer. They ran us so we never got no res’ till we got to Booneville, Mississippi. Then I sent word to Bibb and my uncle came up and got me. Him and Billie Bibb, my young master. Billie Bibb was a soldier too. He was home on a furlough. I was glad to see him because I tell you in the army there was suffering. But I’ll tell you I’ll give them credit, those Tennessee men took care of me just as though I was their own. I was in a two mule wagon. I drove it. I was big enough to drive. The ambulance man stopped in Nashville to see his folks and got a furlough and went on home.”
Work
“I learned how to work—work in the field. Wasn’t nothing but field work. I learned how to hoe first. But in Alabama I learned how to plow. I didn’t want to be no hoe man; I wanted to plow. When I went back to Mississippi, they put me on the plow. I was just eight years old when I learned to plow.”
Share cropping
“Right after freedom, I just kept on plowing. We share cropped. My mama and I would take a crop. She’d work. We’d all work like the devil until I got a job and went to town. She was willing to let me go. That was when I married too.”
How Freedom Came
“All I know about freedom was Old Man Henry Bibb come out and told us we was free. That is how I came to know it. He came out there on the farm and said, ‘Well, you all free as I am. You can stay here if you want to or you can go somewhere else.’ We stayed. Mama stayed there on the farm plumb till she come to town. I don’t know how many years. I was there in town and so she come onto town later. Moved in with the people she was with. They gave up their place. I was nineteen years old when I left the country. My mother gave me her consent,—to marry then, too. She came to town a few years later.
“The slaves weren’t given nothin’ after they was freed. Nothing but what they worked for. They got to be share croppers.”
Ku Klux Klan
“The Ku Klux never bothered me but they sure bothered others. Way yonder in Mississippi directly after the surrender, they’d hated it so bad they killed up many of them. They caught white men there and whipped them and killed them. They killed many a nigger. They caught a white man there and whipped him and he went on up to Washington, D. C. and came back with a train load of soldiers. They came right down there in the south end of our town and they carried them Ku Kluxers away by train loads full. They cleaned out the east side of the river. The Ku Klux had been stringing up niggers every which way. ’Twasn’t nothin’ to find a nigger swinging up in the woods. But those soldiers come from Washington City. If they didn’t clean ’em up, I’ll hush.