"The kids nowadays can go right to the store and buy a ball to play with. We'd have to make a ball out of yarn and put a sock around it for a cover. Six of us would stay on one side of a house and six on the other side. Then we'd throw the ball over the roof and say 'Catch!' If you'd catch it you'd run around to the; other side and hit somebody, then start over. We worked so hard we couldn't play long on Sunday evenings.
"School? We never seen the inside of a schoolhouse. Mistress used to read the Bible to us every Sunday morning.
"We say two songs I still remember.
"I think when I read that sweet story of old,
When Jesus was here among men,
How he called little children like lambs to his fold,
I should like to have been with them then.
"I wish that his hands had been placed on my head,
That his arms had been thrown around me,
That I might have seen his kind face when he said
'Let the little ones come unto me.'
"Yet still to his footstool in prayer I nay go
And ask for a share of his love,
And that I might earnestly seek Him below
And see Him and hear Him above.
"Then there was another:
"I want to be an angel
And with the angels stand
With a crown upon my Forehead
And a harp within my hand.
"And there before my Saviour,
So glorious and so bright,
I'd make the sweetest music
And praise him day and night.
"And as soon as we got through singing those songs, we had to get right out to work. I was always glad when they called us in the house to Sunday school. It was the only chance we'd get to rest.
"When the slaves got sick, they'd take and look after themselves. My master had a whole wall of his house for medicine, just like a store. They made their own medicines and pills. My mistress's brother, Dr. Jim Taylor, was a doctor. They done their own doctoring. I still have the mark where I was vaccinated by my master.
"People was lousy in them days. I always had to pick louses from the heads of the white children. You don't find children like that nowadays.
"My mistress had a little roan horse. She went all through the war on that horse. Us little kids never went around the big folks. We didn't watch folks faces to learn, like children do now. They wouldn't let us. All I know about the Civil War was that it was goin' on. I heard talk about killin' and so on, but I didn't know no thin' about it.