“I fell in the hands of some mean people.  They worked me on the frozen ground barefooted.  My feet frostbit.  I wore a shirt dress and a britches leg cap on my head and ears.  I had no shoes, no underwear.  I slept on a bed made in the corner of a room called a bunk.  It had bagging over straw and I covered with bagging.  Aunt July (Julie) and Uncle Mass Harris come for me.  Sister brought my horse pa left for me.  They took me from, them folks to stay at Mr. W.C.  Winters.  He was good to me.  He give me fifty dollars and fed me and my horse.  He give me good clothes and a house in his yard.  I was hungry.  He fattened me and my horse both.

“They broke the Ku Klux up by putting grapevines across the roads.  I know about that?  I never seen one of them in my life.

“Election days years gone by was big times.  I did vote.  I voted regular a long time.  The last President I voted for was Wilson.

“I farmed and worked on steamboats on the Mississippi River.  I was what they called rousterbout.  I loaded and unloaded freight, I worked on the Choctaw, Jane White, Kate Adams, and other little boats a few days at a time.  Kate Adams burnt at Moons Landing.  I stopped off here at Helena for Christmas.  Some people got drowned and some burned to death.  The mud clerk got lost.  He went in and got two bags of silver money, put them in his pockets.  The stave plank broke and he went down and never come up.  He was at the shore nearly but nobody knew he had that silver in his pockets.  He never come up and he drowned.  People seen him go in but the others swum out.  He never come up.  They missed him and found him dead and the two bags of silver.  I was due to be on there but I wanted to spend Christmas with grandma and my wife.  The Choctaw carried ten thousand bales of cotton at times.  I worked at the oil mill sixteen or seventeen years.  I night watched on the transfer twenty-two years.  I come to Helena when I was thirty years old.  I’m eighty-six now.  The worst thing I ever done was drink whiskey some.  I done quit it.  I have asthma.  The doctors say whiskey is bad on that disease.  I don’t tetch it now.

“I think the present generation is crazy.  I wish I had the chance they have now.  The present times is getting better.  I ask the Lord to spare me to be one hundred years old.  I’m strong in the faith.  I pray every day.  He will open the way.  The times have changed in my life.”

Interviewer:  Miss Irene Robertson
Person interviewed:  William Brown, Hazen, Arkansas
Age:  67

I was born in Virginia but I was born after slavery.  I heard my folks talk a heap about oldern times.  The way I come here was Dr. Hill brought bout 75 families down to Mississippi to work on farms.  I come to Deer Creek close to Sunflower, Mississippi.  I lived there 11 years and I drifted to Arkansas.

I don’t remember if they was in any uprisings or not.  If they was any rebellion cept the big rebellion I don’t recall it.  My whole families was in de heat of the war.