"I heard my stepmother--I call her my mother--say some thing once. She
belonged to a white family named Bell. They had a lot of slaves. My
stepmother was the house girl; so she could get on to a lot of things
the others couldn't. She stayed in the house. That was in slavery times.
The speculators who were buying colored folks would put up at that
place. Looked like a town but it all belonged to one person. The name of
the place was Cloverdale, Tennessee. My stepmother said that a gang of
these folks put up at Cloverdale once and then went on to Nashville,
Tennessee. On the next day a nigger sold the speculator. He was educated
and a mulatto, and he sold his master in with a bunch of other niggers.
He was just fixin' to take the money, when his master got aware of it,
and come on up just in time. I don't know what happened to the nigger.
It was just an accident he got caught. My stepmother said it was true.