"During hot weather we wore thin woolen clothes, the material being made
on the farm from the wool of our sheep, in the winter we wore thicker
clothes made on the farm by slaves, and for shoes our measures were
taken of each slave with a stick, they were brought to Baltimore by the
old mistress at the beginning of each season, if she or the one who did
the measuring got the shoe too short or too small you had to wear it or
go barefooted.

"We were never taught to read or write by white people.

"We had to go to the white church, sit in the rear, many times on the
floor or stand up. We had a colored preacher, he would walk 10 miles,
then walk back. I was not a member of church. We had no baptising, we
were christened by the white preacher.

"We had a graveyard on the place. Whites were buried inside of railing
and the slaves on the outside. The members of the white family had
tombstones, the colored had headstones and cedar post to show where they
were buried.

"In Charles County and in fact all of Southern Maryland tobacco was
raised on a large scale. Men, women and children had to work hard to
produce the required crops. The slaves did the work and they were driven
at full speed sometimes by the owners and others by both owner and
overseers. The slaves would run away from the farms whenever they had a
chance, some were returned and others getting away. This made it very
profitable to white men and constables to capture the runaways. This
caused trouble between the colored people and whites, especially the
free people, as some of them would be taken for slaves. I had heard of