SLAVE NARRATIVES - Library of Congress

"One old log house there used to be old lady Lacy Goodman's home* It
has four rooms* It has a hall running through lt# It was built in slave
times* There is a spring about two hundred yards from it* That is about
ten or twelve feet deep* There is a big cypress tree trunk hollowed out
and sunk down in it to make a curbing* That cypress is about two or three
feet across* The old man, Henry Goodman, sunk that cypress down in there
in slavery time* He drove an ox team all the time* That is all the work
he done* She would tell all the overseers, f Now, don v t you fool with Henry
because we ain f t never whipped him ourselves* f
*I don f t know who it is that is living now* It f s been fifty years ago
since I was there*
Bight After Freedom
"Right after freedom, when the surrender came, my mother was just a
girl f bout fifteen or sixteen* She married after freedom* Her and her
husband farmed for a living--you know, sharecropped*
Ku KI^T yifrTi
"The Ku Klux and the pateroles were the same thing, only the Elan was
more up to date* It f s all set up with a hellish principle* It's old
Pharaoh exactly*
"The Ku Klux Klan didn't have no particular effect on the Negro except
to scare him*
"When the emancipation came about, the people of the South went to work
to see what they could do about it* The whole South was under martial law*
Some of the people formed the Ku Klux Klan to keep the Negro down* I never
remember that they bothered any of our family or the people in our house*
But they scared some and whipped more, and killed some*
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