“My father lived to see freedom.  He has been dead more than twelve years.  He died at my home.

“He was so close to the fighting that he could hear the guns and the firing.  When they was freed, some white people told him, ’You are just as free as we are.’  I was born after the Emancipation proclamation.  The proclamation was issued in September and I was born in October.  It didn’t become effective till January first.  So I was born a slave any way you take it.

“The farm my father worked on was on the Pearl River.  It was very fertile.  It was in Mississippi.  A very big road runs beside the farm.  The road is called the Big Road.  The nigger quarters were across the road on the south side.

“My mother’s folks treated her nicely too.  Mr. Rankins didn’t have any slaves but Mrs. Rankins had some.  Her people gave them to her.  My grandma who belonged to her had twenty-six children.  She got her start off of the slaves her parents gave her, and finally she had about seventy-five.  She ran a farm.  My mother’s work was house woman.  She worked in the house.  Her mistress was good to her.  The overseer couldn’t whip the niggers, except in her presence, so that she could see that it wasn’t brutal.  She didn’t allow the women to be whipped at all.  When an overseer got rough, she would fire him.  Slaves would run away sometimes and stay in the woods if they thought that they would get a whipping for it.  But she would send word for them to come on back and they wouldn’t be whipped.  And she would keep her word about it.  The slaves on her place were treated so good that they were called free niggers by the other white people.  When they were whipped, they would go to the woods.

“I have heard them speak of the pateroles often.  They had to get a pass and then the pateroles wouldn’t bother them.  They would whip you and beat you if you didn’t have a pass.  Slavery was an awful low thing.  It was a bad system.  You had to get a pass to go to see your wife.  If you didn’t have that pass, they would whip you.  The pateroles carried on their work for a good while after slavery was over, and the Civil War had ended.

“I was pretty good when I was a boy.  So I never had any trouble then.  I was right smart size when I saw the Ku Klux.  They would whip men and women that weren’t married and were living together.  On the first day of January, they would whip men and boys that didn’t have a job.  They kept the Negroes from voting.  They would whip them.  They put up notices, ’No niggers to come out to the polls tomorrow.’  They would run them off of government land which they had homesteaded.  Sometimes they would just persuade them not to vote.  A Negro like my father, they would say to him, ’Now, Brown, you are too good to get messed up.  Them other niggers ’round here ain’t worth nothing, but you are, and we don’t want to see you get hurt.  So you stay ‘way from the polls tomorrow.’  And tomorrow, my father would stay away, under the circumstances.  They had to depend on the white people for counsel.  They didn’t know what to do themselves.  The other niggers they would threaten them and tell them if they came out they would kill them.