He would sit hours with his peach brandy, cursing and swearing, laughing and telling stories full of obscenity and blasphemy.

He would sometimes start up, take my whip, and rush out to the slave quarters, flourish it about and frighten the inmates and often cruelly beat them.

He would order the women to pull up their clothes, in Alabama style, as he called it, and then whip them for not complying.

He would then come back roaring and shouting to the house, and tell me what he had done; if I did not laugh with him, he would get angry and demand what the matter was.

Oh! how often I have laughed, at such times, when my heart ached within me; and how often, when permitted to retire to my bed, have I found relief in tears! He had no wife, but kept a colored mistress in a house situated on a gore of land between the plantation and that of Mr.Goldsby.He brought her with him from North Carolina, and had three children by her.
Sometimes in his fits of intoxication, he would come riding into the field, swinging his whip, and crying out to the hands to strip off their shirts, and be ready to take a whipping: and this too when they were all busily at work.