So if I
live and nothing happens to me in watermelon time I will be eighty this
year. I was a boy at surrender about the age of fourteen or fifteen.
"My work was very easy when I was a little slave. Something got wrong
with my foot when I first started to walking and I was crippled. I could
not get around like the other children, so my work was to nurse all of
the time. Sometimes, as fast as I got one baby to sleep I would have to
nurse another one to sleep. We belonged to Mars Colonel Williams and he
had I guess a hundred families on his place and nearly every family had
a baby, so I had a big job after all. The rest of the children carried
water, pine, drove up cows and held the calves off and made fires at old
mar's house.
"I had to keep a heap fire so the boys wouldn't have to beat fire out of
rocks and iron. Old miss did the cooking while all of the slaves worked.
The slaves stood around the long back porch and ate. They ate out of
wooden bowls and wooden spoons. They ate greens and peas and bread. And
old miss fed all of us children in a large trough. She fed us on what we
called the licker from the greens and peas with bread mashed in it. We
children did not use spoons.
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