"I don't reckon children them days knowed what a biscuit was. They just raked up whatever was left off the table and brung it to you. Children have a good time nowadays.
"People goin' to work heard me hollering and came in and put out the fire. I got scars all round my waist today I could show you.
"Another time my mother had to go off and leave me. I was older then. I guess I must have gotten hungry and wanted to get somethin' to eat. So I got up and wandered off into the woods. There weren't many people living round there then. (This was in Trenton (?), Arkansas, a small place not far from Helena.) And the place was [HW: not] built up much then and they had lots of wolves. Wolves make a lot of noise when they get to trailin' anything. I got about a half mile from the road and the wolves got after me. I guess they would have eat me up but a man heard them howling, and he knew there wasn't no house around there but ours, and he came to see what was up, and he beat off the wolves and carried me back home. There wasn't nare another house round there but ours and he knew I must have come from there.
"Mother was working then. It was night though. They brung the news to her and they wouldn't let her come to me. Mother said she felt like getting a gun and killin' them. Her child out like that and they wouldn't let her go home.
"That must have happened after freedom, because it was the last mistress she had. Almost all her beatings and trouble came from her last mistress. That woman sure gave her a lot of trouble.
Age, Good Masters
"All I know about my age is what my mother told me.
"The first people that raised my mother had her age in the Bible. She said she was about fifteen years old when I was born. From what she told me, I must be about seventy-eight years old. She taught me that I was born on Sunday, on the thirtieth of January, in the year before the War.
"My mother's name was Myles. I don't know what her first master's name was. She told me I was born in Phelps County, Missouri; I guess you'd call it St. Louis now. I am giving you the straight truth just as she gave it to me.
"From the way she talked, the people what raised her from a child were good to her. They raised her with their children. Them people fed her just like they fed their own children.