She laughed and said: "No, Ma'am, I don't know nothing about such low
down things as hants and ghosts! Rawhead and Bloody Bones, I just
thought he was a skelerpin, with no meat on him. Course lots of Negroes
believe in ghosts and hants. Us chillun done lots of flightin' like
chillun will do. I remember how little Marse Mark Stroud used to take
all the little boys on the plantation and teach 'em to play Dixie on
reeds what they called quills. That was good music, but the radio has
done away with all that now.

"I knowed I was a slave and that it was the War that sot me free. It was
'bout dinner time when Marse Billy come to the door and called us to the
house. He pulled out a paper and read it to us, and then he said: 'You
all are free, as I am.' We couldn't help thinking about what a good
marster he always had been, and how old, and feeble, and gray headed he
looked as he kept on a-talkin' that day. 'You all can stay on here with
me if you want to,' he 'lowed, 'but if you do, I will have to pay you
wages for your work.'

"I never saw no Yankees in Athens, but I was in Atlanta at Mrs.
Winship's on Peachtree Street, when General Sherman come to that town
'parin' his men for to go home. There was about two thousand in all,
white and black. They marched up and down Marietta Street from three
o'clock in the evening 'til seven o'clock next morning. Then they left.
I remember well that there warn't a house left standing in Atlanta, what
warn't riddled with shell holes. I was scared pretty nigh to death and I
never want to leave home at no time like that again. But Pa saw 'em soon
after that in Athens. They was a marching down Broad Street on their way
to Macon, and Pa said it looked like a blue cloud going through.