As victorious armies went through the country, they told the negroes, "You are free!" Negroes accepted the tidings in different ways. Old Aunt Hannah was not sure but that the assurance was an insult. "Law, marster!" she said, "I ain' no free nigger! I is got a marster an' mistiss! Dee right dar in de great house. Ef you don' b'lieve me, you go dar an' see." "You're a d----d fool!" he cried and rode on. "Sambo, you're free!" Some negroes picked up the master's saddle, flung it on the master's horse, jumped on his back and rode away with the Yankees. After every Yankee army swarmed a great black crowd on foot, men, women, and children. They had to be fed and cared for; they wearied their deliverers. Yankees told my father's negroes they were free, but they did not accept the statement until "Ole Marster" made it. I remember the night. They were called together in the back yard--a great green space with blossomy altheas and fruit-trees and tall oaks around, and the scent of honeysuckles and Sweet Betseys making the air fragrant. He stood on the porch beside a table with a candle on it. I, at his knee, looked up at him and out on the sea of uplifted black faces. Some carried pine torches. He read from a paper, I do not know what, perhaps the emancipation proclamation. They listened silently. Then he spoke, his voice trembling: "You do not belong to me any more. You are free. You have been like my own children. I have never felt that you were slaves. I have felt that you were charges put into my hands by God and that I had to render account to Him of how I raised you, how I treated you. I want you all to do well. You will have to work, if not for me, for somebody else. Heretofore, you have worked for me and I have supported you, fed you, clothed you, given you comfortable homes, paid your doctors' bills, bought your medicines, taken care of your babies before they could take care of themselves; when you were sick, your mistress and I have nursed you; we have laid your dead away. I don't think anybody else can have the same feeling for you that she and I have. I have been trying to think out a plan for paying wages or a part of the crop that would suit us all; but I haven't finished thinking it out. I want to know what you think. Now, you can stay just as you have been staying and work just as you have been working, and we will plan together what is best. Or, you can go. My crops must be worked, and I want to know what arrangements to make. Ben! Dick! Moses! Abram! line up, everybody out there. As you pass this porch, tell me if you mean to stay; you needn't promise for longer than this year, you know. If you want to go somewhere else, say so--and no hard thoughts!"