man that had hounds to track you if you run away. They'd run you and bay
you, and a white man would ride up there and say, 'If you hit one of
them hounds, I'll blow your brains out.' He'd say 'your damn brains.'
Them hounds would worry you and bite you and have you bloody as a beef,
but you dassent to hit one of them. They would tell you to stand still
and put your hands over your privates. I don't guess they'd have killed
you but you believed they would. They wouldn't try to keep the hounds
off of you; they would set them on you to see them bite you. Five or six
or seven hounds bitin' you on every side and a man settin' on a horse
holding a doubled shotgun on you.

"My old miss's sister hired slave women out to old Jim Holbert once. One
of them was in a delicate state, and they dug a hole and put her stomach
down in it and whipped her till she could hardly walk.

"Holbert lived to see the niggers freed. All of his slaves left him
pretty well when freedom come. He managed to hold on to his money. He
didn't go to the War. He was pretty old. He had two sons in the War--his
wife had one in there and he had one. One of them got wounded but he
didn't die.

"My mistress's oldest son, Ed Sterling, got shot in the Civil War. He
got shot right in the side at Franklin, Tennessee. It tore his whole
side off--near about killed him. But he lived to ride paterole. He was
mean. Catch a man in bed with his wife at night, he'd whip him and make
him go home. He was the meanest man in the world. All the other sons
were better than he was. His name was Ed Sterling.

"The first thing I remember was work. You weren't allowed to remember
nothing but work in slave times and you got whipped about that. You