Oklahoma Writers’ Project                                   - 5 -    348

Young Mister Ned was a devil, too. When his mammy died he went out and
“blanket married.” I mean he brung in a half white and half Indian woman
and just lived with her.
	The slaves would get rations every Monday morning to do them all week.
The Overseer would weigh and measure according to how many in the family, and
if you run out you just starve till you get some more. We all know the
overseer steal some of it for his own self but we can’t do anything, so we
get it from the old Master some other way.
	One day I was carrying water from the spring and I run up on Grandmammy
and Uncle Nick skinning a cow. “What you-all doing?”, I say, and they say
keep my  mouth shut or they kill me. They was stealing from the Master to
piece out down at the quarters with. Old Master had so many cows he never
Did count the difference.
	I guess I wasn’t any worse than any the rest of the Negroes, but I was
bad to tell little lies. I carry scars on my legs to this day where Old
Master whip me for lying, with a rawhide quirt he carry all the time for
his horse. When I lie to him he just jump down off’n his horse and whip me
good right there.
	In slavery days we all ate sweet potatoes all the time. When they
didn’t measure out enough of the tame kind we would go out in the woods and
get the wild kind. They growed along the river sand betaween where we lived
And Wilson’s Rock, out west of our place.
	Then we had boiled sheep and goat, mostly goat, and milk and wild greens
and corn pone. I think the goat meat was the best, but I aint had no teeth
for forty years now, and a chunk of meat hurts my stomach. So I just eats