"My father's name was Alphonso Dorgens and my mother's name was Lizzie Dorgens. Both of them dead. I don't know what her name was before she married. My pa belonged to the Dorgens' and he married my ma. That is how she come to be a Dorgen. Old Man Ash never did buy him. He just visited my mother. They all was in the same neighborhood. Big plantations. Both of them had masters that owned lots of land. I don't know how often he visited my mother after he married her. He was over there all the time. They were right adjoining plantations.
"I was born in a frame house. I don't know nothin' about it no more than that. It was j'ined to the kitchen. My mother had two rooms j'ined to the kitchen. She was the old mistress' cook. She could come right out of the kitchen and go on in her room.
"My father worked on the farm. They fed the slaves meat and bread. That is all I remember—meat and bread and potatoes. They made lots of potatoes. They gave 'em what they raised. You could raise stuff for yourself if you wanted to.
"My mother took care of her children. We children was on the place there with her. She didn't have nobody's children to take care of but us.
"I was six years old during of the War. My ma told me my age, but I forgot it; I never did have it put down. The only way I gits a pension, I just tells 'em I was six years old during of the War, and they figures out the age. Sorta like that. But I know I was six years old when the Rebels and the Yankees was fighting.
"I seed the Yankees come through. I seed that. They come in the time old master was gone. He run off—he run away. He didn't let 'em git him. I was a little child. They stayed there all day breaking into things—breaking into the molasses and all like that. Old mistress stayed upstairs hiding. The soldiers went down in the basement and throwed things around. Old master was a senator; they wanted to git him. They sure did cuss him: 'The ----, ----, ----, old senator,' they would say. He took his finest horses and all the gold and silver with him somewheres. They couldn't git 'im. They was after senators and high-ups like that.
"The soldiers tickled me. They sung. The white people's yard was jus' full of them playing 'Yankee Doodle' and 'Hang Jeff Davis on a Sour Apple Tree.'
"All the white people gone! Funny how they run away like that. They had to save their selves. I 'member they took one old boss man and hung him up in a tree across a drain of water, jus' let his foot touch—and somebody cut him down after 'while. Those white folks had to run away.
Patrollers
"I used to hear them all talk about the patrollers. I used to hear my mother talking about them. My ma said my master wouldn't let the patrollers come on his place. They could go on anybody else's place but he never did let them come on his place. Some of the slaves were treated very bad. But my ma said he didn't allow a patroller on the place and he didn't allow no other white man to touch his niggers. He was a big white man—a senator. He didn't know all his Negroes but he didn't allow nobody to impose on them. He didn't let no patroller and nobody else beat up his niggers.