She would set it
aside when she got through and put it down and put her head under it to
pray.
"My father, when nine years old, was put on the speculator's block and
sold at Charlottesville, North Carolina. My mother was sold on the same
day. They sold her to a man named Paul Barringer, and refugeed her to a
place near Sardis, Mississippi, to the cotton country. Before he was
sold, my father belonged to the Greers in Charlottesville. I don't know
who owned my mother. I never did hear her say how old she was when she
was sold. They was auctioned off just like you would sell goods. One
would holler one price and another would holler another, and the highest
bid would get the slave.
"Mother did not go clear to Sardis but to a plantation ten miles from
Sardis. This was before freedom. We stayed there till two years after
freedom.
"I remember when my mother moved. I had never seen a wagon before. I was
so uplifted, I had to walk a while and ride a while. We'd never seen a
wagon nor a train neither. McKeever was the place where she moved from
when she moved to Sardis.
"The first year she got free, she started sharecropping on the place.
The next year she moved. That was the year she moved to Sardis itself.
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