"The French were very kind to their slaves. The Americans called all us people that belonged to the Frenchmen free people. They never gave the free Negroes among them any trouble. I mean the Frenchmen didn't give them no trouble.
"The reason we finally left the place after freedom was because of the meanness of a colored woman, Amanda Sanders. I don't know what she had against us. The old mistress raised me right in the house and fed me right at the table. When she died, this woman used to beat the devil out of me. We had had good owners. They never had no overseers until just before the War broke out, and they never beat nobody.
"The first overseer was on a boat named the Quapaw when the mate knocked him in the head and put him in a yawl and took him to the shore. The boss saw it and took four men and went and got him and had the doctor attend to him. It was a year before he could do anything. He didn't stay there long before they had him in the War. He just got to oversee a short time after he got well. He was in the cavalry. The other boys went off later. They took the cavalry first. None of them ever came back. They were lost in the big fight at Vicksburg. My paran, Mark Noble, he was the only one that got back.
"I don't remember my father's father. But I know that his mother went in the name of Rhoda. I don't know her last name. She was my grandma on his side.
"I belonged to a man named Brumbaugh. His first name was Raphael. He was a all right man. He had a colored man for an overseer before this here white man I was tellin' you about came to him. 'Uncle' Jesse was the foreman. He was not my uncle. He was related to my wife though; so I call him uncle now. Of course, I didn't marry till after freedom came. I married in 1875.
Early Days
"When I was a little child, my duty was to clean up the yard and feed the chickens. I cleaned up the yard every Friday.
House, Furniture, and Food
"My mother lived in a cabin—log, two rooms, one window, that is one window in each room.
"They didn't have anything but homemade furniture. We never had no bed bought from the store—nothin' like that. We just had something sticking against the wall. It was built in a corner with one post out. They made their table and used benches—two-legged and sometimes four-legged. The two-legged benches was a long bench with a wide plank at each end for legs.