if you weren't a good man, that cotton got wet. I never wetted my
cotton. But jus' the same, I heard what the others heard. One day after
we had finished loading, I thought I'd tell him something. The men
advised me not to. He was a rough man, and he carried a gun in his
pocket and a gun in his shirt. I walked up to him and said, 'Captain, I
don't know what your name is, but I know you's a white man. I'm a
nigger, but I got a name jus' like you have. My name's Webb. If you call
Webb, I'll come jus' as quick as I will for any other name and a lot
more willing. If you don't want to say Webb, you can jus' say "Let's
go," and you'll find me right there.' He looked at me a moment, and then
he said, 'Where you from?' I said, 'I'm from Georgia, but I came on this
boat from Little Hock.' He put his arm around my shoulder and said,
'Come on upstairs.' We had two or three drinks upstairs, and he said,
'You and your pardner are the only two men I have that is worth a damn.'
Then he said, 'But you are right; you have a name, and you have a right
to be called by it.' And from then on, he quit callin' us out of our
names.

"But I only stayed on the boat six months. It wasn't because of the
captain. Them niggers was bad. They gambled all the time, and I gambled
with them. But they wouldn't stop at that. They would argue and fight
and cut and shoot. A man would shoot a man down, and then kick him off
into the river. Then when there was roll call, nobody would know what
became of him. I didn't like that. I knew that I was goin' to kill
somebody if I stayed on that boat 'cause I didn't intend for nobody to
kill me. So I stopped.

"After that, I went back to the man that I worked for the month for and
stayed with him till I married. I took care of the stock. I was only
married once. My wife died the fourteenth of October. We had three