3.
where n,y s isber stayed ‚ I went through the gate . I asked j f this was the house

where I~&ry Meriwethe r lived . Her misires s aaid ‚ ‘Yes ‚ ‘ ~ j~, the baok. Are you

the fri Mr. I~Leriwether‘ s looking ‘ ~y heart was in xr~r mouth. It gust seemed

I COU1dU‘t go through -t~he gate. I never even saw my sister that time. I hid for

a while and then went back.

	“We didn‘t have any churches . My master would come down Sunday morning with just enough flour to ina~e bread. Coffee, too. Thefr coffee ~s parts of meal, corn and so on. Work all week and that‘s what they had for coffee.

“We us e d to s ing ‚ t~~~j~ig ‚ low ‚ sweet harit • ~When our fo Iks sang that ‚ we could really see the chariot. .

tf~»~e, Jim Ferguson, a colored man, came to teachschool. Thè white folks

beat an.d whipped hini an.d drove him away in his underwea±~•

	“i wanted so hard to learn to read, but I didn‘t even know I wa s free, even when slavery was ended.

	“I been so exhausted working, I was like an inoh-worxa crawling along a roof.

I worked till I thought another lick would kill me. Ij~ you had sc&nething to do, you did it or got whipped. Once I was so tired I couldn‘t work any more. I crawled in a hole under the house and stayed there till I was rested. I didn‘t get whipped, ‘either.

	“I never will ~orget it how my master alwa~rs ‘used to say, ‘Keep a nigger dpwn&‘ I never will forget it. I used to wait on table and I heard them talk.

	“The only fun we had was on Sunday evening, after work. That was the only chano e we got . We us ed to go away off from the hous e and play in the haysta~k.

	“Our folks was s o cruel ‚ the slaves used to whisper ‚ round • S orne of ‘them knew ‘they was free ‚ e yen if the white fo iks didn ‚ t want ‚ em to find cut they was free. They went off in the woods sometimes. But I was just a little kid ~.ñd I waa*‘t allowed to go around the big folks.

	‘fi seen enough what the old fol]~ went through. My sister ~d I‘ went through enough ‚ afte1r‘ ~ slaTéry was over‘. For ‚ twenty~o~e ‚ long years we were enslaved, even