"When them pans fell they didn't break. They even as much as made their own trays to make bread in. They would take a cypress tree and dig it out and them scoundrels lasted too. Don't see nothin' like that now. Tin pan is big enough to make up bread in now. In them days they made anything. Water buckets,--they did buy them. Old master would give 'em a pass to go get 'em. Anything they wanted, he would give 'em if he thought it necessary. Old master would get 'em all the buckets. He was good and he would buy what you would ask him for. They made milk buckets. They made 'em just like they make 'em now."
"My people were all field hands. My master had a great big farm--three or four hundred acres. I waited table when I was a little chap and I learned to plow before the War was over."
"Old Man Bibb was as good and clever a man as ever you knowed. That overseer down there, if he whipped a man Old Man Bibbs would say, 'Here's your money. Don't want you beating up my niggers so they can't work. I don't need you.' He'd tell 'im quick he don't need him and he can git. That's the kind of man he was. Wouldn't let you be mobbed up. He was a good christian man. I'll give that to him. In the time of the War when they was freeing slaves and I was a little old eight-year-old kid, there was a little old Dutchman, a Tennessee man, he came out in the country to get feed. Out there in Alabama.
"I was in Alabama then. The white woman that raised me had taken me there. She had done married again and left me with mama awhile. While I was little, that was. When I was about seven, she came and got me again and carried me down in Alabama and raised me with her children. That white woman never called me nothin' but baby as long as she lived. You know she cared for me just like I was one of her's. When a person raise a child from a month old she can't help from loving it.
"This Dutchman come and asked me where my parents was and I told him they was in Mississippi. He slipped me away from my folks and carried me to Decatur and they got cut off there. He was a Yankee soldier, and old Forrest's army caught 'em and captured me and then carried me first nearly to Nashville. They got in three miles of the town and couldn't get no closer. They ran us so we never got no res' till we got to Booneville, Mississippi. Then I sent word to Bibb and my uncle came up and got me. Him and Billie Bibb, my young master. Billie Bibb was a soldier too. He was home on a furlough. I was glad to see him because I tell you in the army there was suffering. But I'll tell you I'll give them credit, those Tennessee men took care of me just as though I was their own. I was in a two mule wagon. I drove it. I was big enough to drive. The ambulance man stopped in Nashville to see his folks and got a furlough and went on home."