And my mother was down with consumption too. I
aimed to git old Phipps for that. But then I got religion and I couldn't
do it. Religion makes you forgit a heap of things.
"Susan Reed, my old mistress, bought my father and paid fifteen hundred
dollars for him and she hadn't never seen 'im. Advertising. He had run
away so much that they had to advertise and sell 'im. He never would run
away from Miss Susan. She was good to him till she got that old nigger
beater Phipps. Her husband, Reed, was called a nigger spoiler. My father
was an old man when Phipps was on overseer and wasn't able to fight much
then.
"Phipps sure was a bad man. He wasn't so bad neither; but the niggers
was scared of him. You know in slave times, sometimes when a master
would git too bad, the niggers would kill him--tote him off out in the
woods somewheres and git rid of him. Two or three of them would git
together and scheme it out, and then two or three of them would git him
way out and kill 'im. But they didn't nobody ever pull nothin' like
that on Phipps. They was scared of him.
"One time I saw the Yankees a long way off. They had on blue uniforms
and was on coal black horses. I hollered out, 'Oh, I see somethin'.' My
mistress said, 'What?' I told her, and she said, 'Them's the Yankees.'
She went on in the house and I went with her. She sacked up all the
valuables in the house.
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