SLAVE NARRATIVES - Library of Congress

for the field. They didn't allow the slaves to raise anything
for themselves and they didn't give them much,
"The slaves made their own clothes and their own cloth.
They would not let the slaves have anything much. To keep them
from being stark naked, they'd give them a piece to wear,
"Mama got to see her mother in 1885, When I married she
left and went to Missouri and found her sister and half-sister
and her mother and brother or cousin. She found her sister's
oldest daughter. She was a baby laying in the cradle when mama
ran through the field to get away from a young man that wanted
to talk to her.
"My grandmother was a full-blooded Indian. Her husband
was a French Negro. Nancy Cheatham was her name.
"The Ku Klux never bothered us. They bothered some peo-
ple about a mile from us. They took out the old man and whipped
him. They made his wife get up and dance and she was in a delir
cate state. They made her get out of bed and dance, and after
that they took her and whipped her and beat her, and she was in
a delicate state too.
"There was a man there in Black Rock though that stopped
them from bothering anybody. He killed one of them. They went
to the train. They was raging around there then. He got off
the train and they tried to take him to jail. The jail was way
out through the woods. He hadn't done anything at all. They
just took hold of him to take him to the jail because he had just
come into the town. They had tugged him down the road and when
they got to the woods, he took out his gun and killed one of
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