He ordered that the field hands should be called together to witness my punishment, that it might serve as a caution to them never to attend a prayer meeting, or runaway as I had, lest they should receive the same punishment.

At the sound of the overseer’s horn, all the slaves came forward and witnessed my punishment.  My clothing was stripped off and I was compelled to lie down on the ground with my face to the earth.  Four stakes were driven in the ground, to which my hands and feet were tied.  Then the overseer stood over me with the lash and laid it on according to the Deacon’s order.  Fifty lashes were laid on before stopping.  I was then lectured with reference to my going to prayer meeting without his orders, and running away to escape flogging.

While I suffered under this dreadful torture, I prayed, and wept, and implored mercy at the hand of slavery, but found none.  After I was marked from my neck to my heels, the Deacon took the gory lash, and said he thought there was a spot on my back yet where he could put in a few more.  He wanted to give me something to remember him by, he said.

After I was flogged almost to death in this way, a paddle was brought forward and eight or ten blows given me with it, which was by far worse than the lash.  My wounds were then washed with salt brine, after which I was let up.  A description of such paddles I have already given in another page.  I was so badly punished that I was not able to work for several days.  After being flogged as described, they took me off several miles to a shop and had a heavy iron collar riveted on my neck with prongs extending above my head, on the end of which there was a small bell.  I was not able to reach the bell with my hand.  This heavy load of iron I was compelled to wear for six weeks.  I never was allowed to lie in the same house with my family again while I was the slave of Whitfield.  I either had to sleep with my feet in the stocks, or be chained with a large log chain to a log over night, with no bed or bedding to rest my wearied limbs on, after toiling all day in the cotton field.  I suffered almost death while kept in this confinement; and he had ordered the overseer never to let me loose again; saying that I thought of getting free by running off, but no negro should ever get away from him alive.

I have omitted to state that this was the second time I had run away from him; while I was gone the first time, he extorted from my wife the fact that I had been in the habit of running away, before we left Kentucky; that I had been to Canada, and that I was trying to learn the art of reading and writing.  All this was against me.

It is true that I was striving to learn myself to write.  I was a kind of a house servant and was frequently sent off on errands, but never without a written pass; and on Sundays I have sometimes got permission to visit our neighbor’s slaves, and I have often tried to write myself a pass.