"Everybody went wild. We all felt like heroes and nobody had made us that way but ourselves. We was free. Just like that, we was free. It didn't seem to make the whites mad, either. They went right on giving us food just the same. Nobody took our homes away, but right off colored folks started on the move. They seemed to want to get closer to freedom, so they'd know what it was—like it was a place or a city. Me and my father stuck, stuck close as a lean tick to a sick kitten. The Gudlows started us out on a ranch. My father, he'd round up cattle, unbranded cattle, for the whites. They was cattle that they belonged to, all right; they had gone to find water 'long the San Antonio River and the Guadalupe. Then the whites gave me and my father some cattle for our own. My father had his own brand, 7 B ), and we had a herd to start out with of seventy.
"We knowed freedom was on us, but we didn't know what was to come with it. We thought we was goin' to get rich like the white folks. We thought we was goin' to be richer than the white folks, 'cause we was stronger and knowed how to work, and the whites didn't and they didn't have us to work for them anymore. But it didn't turn out that way. We soon found out that freedom could make folks proud but it didn't make 'em rich.
"Did you ever stop to think that thinking don't do any good when you do it too late? Well, that's how it was with us. If every mother's son of a black had thrown 'way his hoe and took up a gun to fight for his own freedom along with the Yankees, the war'd been over before it began. But we didn't do it. We couldn't help stick to our masters. We couldn't no more shoot 'em than we could fly. My father and me used to talk 'bout it. We decided we was too soft and freedom wasn't goin' to be much to our good even if we had a education."
The old Negro was growing very tired, but, at a request, he instantly got up and tapped his way out into the scorching sunshine to have his photograph taken. Even as he did so, he seemed to smile with those blurred, dead eyes of his. Then he chuckled to himself and said:
"'Warmth of the wind
And heat of the South,
And ripe red cherries
For a ripe, red mouth.'"
"Land sakes, Felix!" came through the window from sister Ella. "How you carries on! Don't you be a-mindin' him, mister."
PHOEBE HENDERSON, a 105 year old Negro of Harrison Co., was born a slave of the Bradley family at Macon, Georgia. After the death of her mistress, Phoebe belonged to one of the daughters, Mrs. Wiley Hill, who moved to Panola County, Texas in 1859, where Phoebe lived until after the Civil War. For the past 22 years she has lived with Mary Ann Butler, a daughter, about five miles east of Marshall, in Enterprise Friendship Community. She draws a pension of $16.00 a month.