"I don't know what I'd done, but one my old Marse Will's chillun done settle close by and they let me work for them, and built me a log house and I farmed on halves. They stood good for all the groceries I buyed that year. It took all I made that year to pay my debts and that's the way its been ever since.
"I married Sarah Keys. We had a home weddin' and 'greed to live together as man and wife. I jus' goes by her home one day and captures her like. I puts her on my saddle behind me and tells her she's my wife then. That's all they was to my weddin'. We had six chillun and they's all farmin' round here. Sarah, she dies seventeen years ago and I jus' lives round with my chillen, 'cause I's too old to do any work.
"All I ever done was to farm. That's all this here nigger knew what to do. O, I's seed the time when I never had nothin' to eat and my big bunch of chillun cryin' for bread. I could go to the woods then, but you can't git wild game no more. In them days it was five or ten mile to your nearest neighbor, but now they's so close you can stand in your yard and talk to them.
"I never done no votin', 'cause them Klu Kluxers was allus at the votin' places for a long time after the niggers was freed. The niggers has got on since them old days. They has gone from nothin' to a fair educated folks. We has been kind of slow, 'cause we was turnt loose without nothin', and couldn't read and write.
"I's worked for fifteen and thirty cents a day, but Lawd, blessed to our president, we gits a li'l pension now and that's kep' me from plumb starvin' to death. Times is hard and folks had to do away with everything when they had that Hoover for president, but they will be straightened out by and by if they'll listen to the president now. 'Course, some wants to kill him, 'cause he helps the poor, but it do look like we ought to have a li'l bread and salt bacon without upsettin' 'em, when they has so much.
ELIGE DAVISON was born in Richmond, Virginia, a slave of George Davison. Elige worked in the field for some time before he was freed, but does not know his age. He lives with one of his grandsons, in Madisonville, Texas.
"My birth was in Richmond. That's over in old Virginny, and George Davison owned me and my pappy and mammy. I 'member one sister, named Felina Tucker.
"Massa and Missus were very good white folks and was good to the black folks. They had a great big rock house with pretty trees all round it, but the plantation was small, not more'n a hunerd acres. Massa growed tobaccy on 'bout 30 of them acres, and he had a big bunch of hawgs. He waked us up 'bout four in the mornin' to milk the cows and feed them hawgs.