"'Whose you think they is? Suttinly they're my teeth.'
"'Ain't you sorry you free?'
"'What I'm goin' to be sorry for? I ain't no fool.'
"'How old is you?'
"I tells them. Some of 'em want to argue with me and say I ain't that old. Some of 'em say, 'Well, the Lawd sure has blessed you.' Sure he's blessed me. Don't I know that?
"I've seen 'em run away from slavery. There was a white man that lived close to us who had just one slave and he couldn't keep him out the woods to save his soul. The white man was named Jim Sales and the colored boy was named—shucks, I can't remember his name. But I know Jim Sales couldn't keep that nigger out the woods nohow.
"I was freed endurin' the Civil War. We was in at dinner and my old mars had been to town. Old man Pleas Collier, our mean mars, called my daddy out and then he said, 'All you come out here.' I said to myself, 'I wonder what he's a goin' to do to my daddy,' and I slipped into the front room and listened. And he said, 'All of you come.' Then I went out too. And he unrolled the Government paper he had in his hand and read it and told us it meant that all of us was free. Didn't tell us we was free as he was. Then he said the Government's going to send you some money to live on. But the Government never did do it. I never did see nobody that got it. Did you? They didn't give me nothin' and they didn't give my father nothin'. They just sot us free and turned us loose naked.
"Right after they got through reading the papers and told us we was free, my daddy took me to the field and put me to work. I'd been workin' in the house before that.
"Then they wasn't payin' nobody nothin'. They just hired people to work on halves. That was the first year. But we didn't get no half. We didn't git nothin'. Just time we got our crop laid by, the white man run us off and we didn't get nothin'. We had a fine crop too. We hadn't done nothin' to him. He just wanted all the crop for hisself and he run us off. That's all.
"Well, after that my daddy took and hired me out up here in Arkansas. He hired me out with some old poor white trash. We was livin' then in Louisiana with a old white man named Mr. Smith. I couldn't tell what part of Louisiana it was no more than it was down there close to Homer, about a mile from Homer. My mother died and my father come and got me and took me home to take care of the chillen.