Color and Birth
"There was a light brownskin boy around there and they give him anything that he wanted. But they didn't like my mother and me—on account of my color. They would talk about it. They tell their children that when I got big enough, I would think I was good as they was. I couldn't help my color. My mother couldn't either.
"My mother's mistress had three boys, one twenty-one, one nineteen, and one seventeen. Old mistress had gone away to spend the day one day. Mother always worked in the house. She didn't work on the farm in Missouri. While she was alone, the boys came in and threw her down on the floor and tied her down so she couldn't struggle, and one after the other used her as long as they wanted for the whole afternoon. Mother was sick when her mistress came home. When old mistress wanted to know what was the matter with her, she told her what the boys had done. She whipped them and that's the way I came to be here.
Sales and Separations
"My mother was separated from her mother when she was three years old. They sold my mother away from my grandmother. She don't know nothing about her people. She never did see her mother's folks. She heard from them. It must have been after freedom. But she never did get no full understanding about them. Some of them was in Kansas City, Kansas. My grandmother, I don't know what became of her.
"When my mother was sold into St. Louis, they would have sold me away from her but she cried and went on so that they bought me too. I don't know nothing about it myself, but my mother told me. I was just nine months old then. They would call it refugeeing. These people that had raised her wanted to get something out of her because they found out that the colored people was going to be free. Those white people in Missouri didn't have many slaves. They just had four slaves—my mother, myself, another woman and an old colored man called Uncle Joe. They didn't get to sell him because he bought hisself. He made a little money working on people with rheumatism. They would ran the niggers from state to state about that time to keep them from getting free and to get something out of them. My mother was sold into Mississippi after freedom. Then she was refugeed from one place to another through Helena to Trenton (?), Arkansas.
Marriages
"My mother used to laugh at that. The master would do all the marryin'. I have heard her say that many a time. They would call themselves jumpin' the broom. I don't know what they did. Whatever the master said put them together. I don't know just how it was fixed up, but they helt the broom and master would say, 'I pronounce you man and wife' or something like that.
Ku Klux
"My mother talked about the Ku Klux but I don't know much about them. She talked about how they would ride and how they would go in and destroy different people's things. Go in the smoke house and eat the people's stuff. She said that they didn't give the colored people much trouble. Sometimes they would give them something to eat.