“Sister was the regular little nurse girl for mother’s mistress.  I don’t recollect her name.  The baby was sickly and fretful.  My sister set and rocked that baby all night long in a homemade cradle.  Mother said she’d nod and go on.  Mother thought she was too young to have to do that way.  Mother stole her away the first year of the Civil War and let her go with some acquaintances of hers.  They was colored folks.  Mother said she had good owners.  They was so good it didn’t seem like slavery.  The plantation belong to the woman.  He was a preacher.  He rode a circuit and was gone.  They had a colored overseer or foreman like.  She wanted a overseer just to be said she had one but he never agreed to it.  He was a good man.

“Mother said over in sight on a joining farm the overseers whooped somebody every day and more than that sometimes.  She said some of the white men overseers was cruel.

“Mother quilted for people and washed and ironed to raise us.  After freedom mother sent for my sister.  I don’t recollect this but mother said when she heard of freedom she took me in her arms and left.  The first I can recollect she was cooking for soldiers at the camps at Montgomery, Alabama.  They had several cooks.  We lived in our own house and mother washed and ironed for them some too.  They paid her well for her work.

“I recollect some of the good eating.  We had big white rice and big soda crackers and the best meat I ever et.  It was pickled pork.  It was preserved in brine and shipped to the soldiers in hogheads (barrels).  We lived there till mother died and I can recollect that much.  When mother died we had a hard time.  I look back now and don’t see how we made it through.  We washed and ironed mostly and had a mighty little bit to eat and nearly nothing to wear.  It was hard times for us three children.  I was the baby child.  My brother hired out when he could.  We stuck together till we all married off.”

Interviewer:  Miss Irene Robertson
Person Interviewed:  Molly Brown
Age:  90 or over Brinkley, Ark.

One morning early I (Irene Robertson) got off the bus and started up Main Street.  I hadn’t gone far before I noticed a small form of a woman.  She wore men’s heavy shoes, an old dark dress and a large fringed woolen shawl; the fringe was well gone and the shawl, once black, was now brown with age.  I passed her and looked back into her face.  I saw she was a Negro, dark brown.  Her face was small with unusually nice features for a woman of her race.  She carried a slick, knotted, heavy walking stick—­a very nice-looking one.  On the other arm was a rectangular split basket with wires run through for a handle and wrapped with a dirty white rag to keep the wire from cutting into her hand or arm.

I stopped and said, “Auntie, could you direct me to Molly Brown’s house?”

“I’m her,” she replied.

“Well, I want to go home with you.”