"The Yankees rode three years over the county in squads, and colored folks
didn't know they was free. I have seen them in their old uniforms riding
around when I was a child. White folks started talking about freedom 'fore the
darkies and turning them loose with the clothes they had on and what they
could tote away. No land, no home, no place; they roamed around.

When it was freedom, the thing Papa done was go to a place and start out
sharecropping. Folks had no horses or mules. They had to plow new ground with
oxen. I plowed when I was a girl, plowed oxen. If you had horses or mules and
the Yankees come along three or four years after the war, they would swap
horses, ride a piece, and if they had a chance swap horses again. Stealing
went on during and long after the war.

The Klu Klux was awful in South Carolina. The colored folks had no church to
go to. They gather around at folk's houses to have preaching and prayers. One
night we was having it at our house, only I was the oldest and was in another
room sound asleep on the bed. There was a crowd at our house. The Klu Klux
come, pulled off his robe and dough face, hung it up on a nail in the room,
and said, "Where's that Jim Jesus?" He pulled him out the room. The crowd run
off. Mama took the three little children but forgot me and run off too. They
beat Papa till they thought he was dead and throwed him in a fence corner. He
was beat nearly to death, just cut all to pieces. He crawled to my bed and
woke me up and back to the steps. I thought he was dead -- bled to death -- on
the steps. Mama come back to leave and found he was alive. She doctored him
up, and he lived thirty years after that. We left that morning. 

The old white woman that owned the place was rich -- big rich. She been
complaining about the noise -- singing and preaching. She called him "Praying
Jim Jesus" till he got to be called that around. He prayed in the field. She
said he disturbed her. Mama said one of the Klu Klux she knowed been raised up
there close to Master Barton's, but Papa said he didn't know one of them that
beat on him."

These are the words of Maggie Stenhouse as told to Irene Robertson. Stenhouse
was born near Pickens, South Carolina.  Interview taken as part of the Federal
Writer's Project, 1936-1938.

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