"He would buy other slaves and sell them though. He used to buy little
kids that couldn't walk. Maybe some big white man would come that would
want to buy a nigger. He used to have servants in the yard and he would
have the slaves he'd bought saved up. One of the yard servants would
catch a little nigger with his head all knotty and filled with twigs. He
would swinge the hair and the little nigger would yell, but he wouldn't
be hurt.
"He had a block built up high just like a meat block out in the yard.
He would have the yard man bring the little niggers out and put them on
this block. I don't know nothing about their parents, who they were nor
where they were. All I know he would have this child there what he'd
done bought.
"If there would be about five or six come in, here's this nigger sitting
up here. Here's a lot of folks waitin' to buy him. One would say, 'I bid
so much.' Another would say, 'I bid so much.' That would go on till the
biddin' got as high as it would go. Then the little nigger would go to
the highest bidder if the bid suited master.
"My mother and father didn't know their age. The white folks kept the
ages, and that was something they didn't allow the slaves to handle. I
must have been four or five years old when my mother was in the field,
because I wasn't allowed to take the baby out of the cradle but just to
sit and rock it.