FRANK BELL. A Slave

He was owned by Johnson Bell and was born in New Orlands, in Louisiana. He is eighty-six years old, his master was French and very bad with him. He runs a salon and keeps the bad women he knows from his father, if he had any, except his mother. The facts say that she was a bad woman and a French Creole. 

   

    He worked in the teachers' lounge, cleaned the coins to know where to go, so he could sow oats. He buried the nickels under the rocks. All he had to eat was old things that those people left, all that was left. Once, some bad men come to the master's and gets in a  shooting scrape and they was two men kilt. He will run. But Master cotch him   and makes him take the men to the river and tie a weight on them, so  they'd sink and doesn't catch him.

     

    The clothes  he wore were some old Master's. they always had holes in them.  Master he stay drunk almost all the time and was mean to his slave. He is the only one he had, and it cost him nothing. He has a sales invoice made, because the law says he stole him when he was a small child.

Master kept him chains a few times. He shot several men. He had no rooms, but he stays round the place and throws the old sack down and lay there and sleeps. He is afraid of run, because Master says he'd hunt and kill him.

    

     Master helt him many years after the war, if anybody gets after  him, he told them he stay because he wants to stay, but he told him if he  left he'd kill him another nigger. He stayed till het gits in drunk brawl one night with men and women and they gits to shooting and some kilt. Master got kilt.

    

      Then, he left to live or die, so he wanders from one place to another, he almost starved to death before left New Orleans, because I couldn't think that Master was dead and afraid.

Finally He gets up nervous to leave the town and he stays the first night in the white man's barn. He never slept. Every time he hears something, jumps up and Master stands there, looking at him, but soon he gets up and he leaves.

      The next night, the poor slave fell asleep in a field of hay, and the Master stood just above a tree and began to shout at him.

They locked him back in jail. He didn't know why, he never knew. One of the men tells him to go with him to the forest and gives him an ax. He cut rails until he almost fell, all by the chain locked around his feet, so he couldn't run. He let it go and wander again.

He never had a home. The works form men long enough to get fifty cents, sixty cents again, like a stray dog.

      After a long time, he married Feline Graham. He had a house and had a white maid who accompanies them. They had a child.

He worked in sawmills and farms all him life, but I could never earn much money.

You know, the black was wild until the white man made what he has out of the nigger. He done educated them real smart.