6.	109




8hare cropping

.	“Bi&it after freedcm, I juat kept on plowing. We share cropped. My mama and I woui..d take a crop. She ‚ d work. ‘ d all work like the devil until I got a job and went to tom. She was willing to let me go. That was when I married too.


How Preedom Came

	“All I know about freedom was Old Man Henry Bibb come out and told us we was free. That is how I cane to know it. He came out there on the farm arid said, ‘Well ‚ you all free as I am. You can stay here 1f you want to or you can ~o samewhere else • ‚ We stayed. M~ia stayed there on the farm plumb till she co~ to town. I don‘t know how many years. I was there in town and so she came onto town later. Moved in with the people she was with. They gave up their place. I was nineteen years old when I lett the country. My mother gave me her consent,.-~to marry then, too. She came to town a few years later.

	“The slave8 weren‘t given nothin‘ after they was freed. Nothing but what they worked for. They got to be share croppers.


Ku Klux Klan

	“The Ku Klux never bothered me but they sure bothered others. lay yonder in Mississippi directly after the surrender, they‘d hated it so bad they killed up many of them. They caught white men there and whipped them and killed them. They killed many a nigger. They caught a white aan there and whipped him and he went on up to Washington, D. C. and cerne back with a train load of soldiers. They cerne right down there in the south end of our town and they carried them Ku Kluxers away by train loads full. They cleaned out the ea8t side of the river. The Ku klux had been stringing up nigger.