No, mam, I never saw any slaves sold, but my father's mother and his sister were sold on the block. The white folks that bought 'em took them away. After the war was over my father tried to locate 'em, but never once did he get on the right track of 'em. Why, my white folks took a great deal of pains teaching their slaves how to read and write. My father could read, but he never learned to write, and it was from our white folks that I learned to read and write.
Slaves read the Bible more than anything else.
My mother was baptized in that Sugar Fork River by a white preacher, but that is the reason I joined the Baptist church, because my mother was a Baptist, and I was so crazy about her, and am 'til yet. There were no funeral parlors in those days. They just funeralized the dead in their own homes, took them to the graveyard in a painted home-made coffin that was lined with thin bleaching made in the loom on the plantation, and buried them in a grave that didn't have any bricks or cement about it. We farmed all my life in Arkansas and Mississippi. I married in Mississippi and we come back here before Joe died.