[TR: deleted: 'Mother said there were'] two families lived on farms adjacent to her father. They were the two Tucker brothers, tobacco raisers. One of the wives, Polly, or Pol, as she was called, hated the family of her husband's brother because they were more affluent than she liked them to be. It [HW: Her jealousy] caused the two families to live in disagreement.
Little Joe belonged to Pol's family, and was somewhere between ten and fourteen years old. Mother said Pol made Joe work in the field at night, and forced him to sing so they would know he wasn't asleep. He wore nothing in summer but an old shirt made of rough factory cloth which came below his knees. She said the only food Pol would give him was swill [HW: scraps] from the table—handed to him out the back door. Mother said Pol had some kind of impediment in her speech, which caused her to say 'ah' at the close of a sentence. So, when she called Joe to the back door to give him his mess of scraps, she would say, "Here, Joe, here's your truck, ah." Mother was a little girl then, and she and grandmother felt so sorry for Joe that they would bake baskets of sweet potatoes and slip [TR: 'to the field to give him' replaced with illegible text ending 'in the field']. She said he would come through the corn, almost crawling, so Pol wouldn't see him, and take the sweet potatoes in the tail of his shirt and scuttle back through the tall stuff where he might hide and eat it them.
She had a Negro woman who had a baby (and there may have been other women) but this Negro woman was not allowed to see her baby except just as a cow would be let in to her calf at certain times during the day, [TR: 'then' replaced by ??] she had to go to the field and leave it alone. Mother said that Pol either threw or kicked the baby into the yard because it cried, and it died. I don't know why the authorities didn't arrest her, but she may have had an alibi, or some excuse for the death of the child.
The Burning of the Tobacco Barn
The [HW: other] Tucker brother had made a fine crop of tobacco that year, more than a thousand dollars worth in his big barn. Pol made one of her slaves go with her, [HW: when] and she set fire to the tobacco barn of her brother-in-law's barn, and not being able to get away [HW: unable to escape] before the flames [HW: brought] a crowd, she hid in the grass, right near the path where the people were running to the fire. She had some kind of stroke, perhaps from fright, or pure deviltry which 'put her out of business'. I wish I could remember whether it killed her or just made a paralytic of her, but this is a true story.