"Right after de war, times is pretty hard and I's taken beans and parched 'em and got 'em right brown, and meal bran to make coffee out of. Times was purty hard, but I allus could find somethin' to work at in dem days.
"I lived all my life 'mong white folks and jus' worked in first one place and then 'nother. I raised ten white chillen, nine of de Lowe chillen, and dey'd mind me quicker dan dey own pappy and mammy. Dat in McMullin County.
"De day I's married I's 59 year old and my wife is 'bout 60 year old now. De last 20 years I's jus' piddled 'round and done no reg'lar work. I married right here in de church house. I nussed my wife when she a baby and used to court her mammy when she's a girl. We's been real happy together.
JAMES D. JOHNSON, born Oct. 1st, 1860, at Lexington, Mississippi, was a slave of Judge Drennon. He now lives with his daughter at 4527 Baltimore St., Dallas, Texas. His memory is poor and his conversation is vague and wandering. His daughter says, "He ain't at himself these days." James attended Tuckaloo University, near Jackson, Mississippi, and uses very little dialect.
"My first clear recollection is about a day when I was five years old. I was playing in the sand by the side of the house in Lexington with some other children and some Yankee soldiers came by. They came on horseback and they drew rein by the side of the house and I ran under the house and hid. My mother called to me to come out and told me they were Federal soldiers and I could tell it by their blue uniforms. One of the soldiers reached into his haversack and pulled out a uniform and gave it to me. 'Have your mammy make a suit out of it,' he said. Another soldier gave me a uniform and my mother was a seamstress in the home of the Drennons and she made me two suits out of those uniforms.
"Judge Drennon had married the daughter of Colonel Terry and he had given my parents to his daughter when she married the judge. My father and mother both came from Virginia. Colonel Terry had bought them at separate times from a slave trader who brought them from Virginia to Mississippi. They had a likeness for each other when they learned both came from Virginia. Both of them had white fathers, were light complected and had been brought up in the big house.
"When they told the Colonel they wished to marry he only said, 'Julia, do you take William,' and 'William, do you take Julia?' Then they were man and wife. He gave them the name of Johnson, which was the family name of my father's mother and the name of his father.