"I recently seen my brother Jeff Davis Street. I haven't seen him
before for sixty-one years. He blew in here from Texas with a man named
Professor Smuggers. He lives in Malakoff, Texas. It's been sixty-one
years since he was where I could see him, but he says he saw me
fifty-nine years ago. He came back home and I was 'sleep, he says, and
he didn't wake me up. He rambled around a little and stood and looked at
me awhile, he says. He was seventeen years old and I was twelve.
"My brother had a lot of children. He had four girls with him. He had a
boy somewheres. He is older than I am.
"I heard my father say that in time of war, they were taking up folks
that wouldn't join them and putting them in prison. They picked a white
fellow up and had him tied with a rope and carried him down to a creek
and were tying him up by his thumbs. He saw my father coming and said:
'There's a colored man I know.' My father said he knew him. They let
him go when my father said he knew him and that he didn't harbor
bushwhackers. Every time he saw my father after that he would say,
'Bill, you sure did save my life.'
"My father and mother lived in a log cabin. They had homemade furniture.
They had a bunk up side the wall and a trundle bed. That was the cabin
they lived in in slavery time.