come 'round on a Monday morning and told papa and the rest that they
were free as he was and that they could go if they wanted to or they
could stay, 'cause they were free as he was and didn't have no master no
more, didn't have no one to domineer over them no more.

"Right after freedom, my folks worked on old man Jim Burdyne's farm.
That is the first place I remember after freedom. Father taken a little
deadening. You don't know what a deadening is? That's a lease. He
cleaned up some land. We boys were just gettin' so we could pick up
brush and tops of trees--and burn it, and one thing and another. Two
years after the War was over, I got big enough to plow. I was plowing
when I was nine years old. We had three boys and four girls older than
me. The balance of them was born after freedom. We made crops on shares
for three years after freedom, and then we commenced to rent. Shares
were one-third of the cotton and one-fourth of the corn. They didn't pay
everything they promised. They taken a lot of it away from us. They said
figures didn't lie. You know how that was. You dassent dispute a man's
word then. Sometimes a man would get mad and beat up his overseer and
run him away. But my daddy wouldn't do it. He said, 'Well, if I owe
anything I'll pay it. I got a large family to take care of.'

"I never got a chance to go to school any. There was too much work to
do. I married when I was twenty-one. I would go off and stay a month or
two and come back. Never left home permanent for a long while. Stayed
'round home till I was forty years old. I come to Arkansas in 1898. I
made a living by farming at first.

"I didn't shoot no craps. I belong to the church. I have belonged to the
church about forty years or more. I did play cords and shoot craps and
things like that for years before I got religion.