"I heard my father say that he helped get out juniper timber in North
Carolina. The white man me and my sister worked with after my father
died was the man my father worked with in the juniper swamp. His name
was Alfred Perry White. As long as he lived, we could do work for him.
We didn't live on his place but we worked for him by the day. He is dead
now--died way back yonder in the seventies. There was the Brooks and
Baxter trouble in 1874, and my father died in seventy-five. White lived
a little while longer.
"My father was married twice before he married my mother. He had two
sets of children. I don't know how many of them there were. He had
four children by my mother. He had only four children as far as I can
remember.
"I don't know how my father and my mother met up. They lived in the same
plantation and in the same house. They were owned by the same man when
freedom came. I don't know how they got together. I have often wondered
about that. One from Tennessee and the other from North Carolina, but
they got together. I guess that they must have been born in different
places and brought together through being bought and sold.
"My mother was a Murrill. My father was a Cartwright. My father's
brother Lewis was a man who didn't take nothing much from anybody, and
he 'specially didn't like to take a whipping. When Lewis' master wanted
to whip him, he would call his mother--the master's mother--and have her
whip him, because he figured Uncle Lewis wouldn't hit a woman.
"I have six children altogether. Two of them are dead. There are three
girls and one boy living. The oldest is fifty-seven; the next, fifty;
and the youngest, forty-eight. The youngest is in the hospital for
nervous and mental diseases. She has been there ever since 1927. The
oldest had an arm and four ribs broken in an auto accident last January
on the sixteenth of the month. She didn't get a penny to pay for her
trouble. I remember the man did give her fifteen cents once. The truck
struck her at the alley there and knocked her clean across the street.
She is fifty-seven years old and bones don't knit fast on people that
old. She ain't able to do no work yet. All of my daughters are out of
work. I don't know where the boy is. He is somewheres up North.