“Our young people are advancing from a literary point of view, but I claim that they are losing out along moral lines.  I don’t believe that we value morals as well as the people did years ago who didn’t know so much.  I believe that the whole nation, white and black, is losing moral stamina.  They do not think it is bad to kill a man, take another man’s wife or rob a bank, or anything else.  They desecrate the churches by carrying anything into the church.  There is no sacred place now.  Carnivals and everything else are carried to the church.

“If Mr. Roosevelt is not reelected again, the country is going to have one of the bloodiest wars it has ever had because we have so many European doctrines coming into the United States.  I have been living seventy-eight years, and I never thought that I would live to see the day when the government would reach out and take hold of things like it has done—­the WPA, the Fera, and the RFC, and other work going on today.  We are headed for communism and we are going to get in a bloody war.  There are hundreds of men going ’round who believe in communism but who don’t want it to be known now.”

Interviewer:  Miss Irene Robertson
Person interviewed:  Maggie Broyles.  Forrest City.  Arkansas
Age:  About 80?

“I was born in Decatur, Tennessee.  Mother was sold on the block at public auction in St. Louis.  Master Bob Young bought a boy and a girl.  My father was a full-blood Irishman.  His name was Lassiter.  She didn’t have no more children by him.  He was hired help on Bob Young’s place.

“Bob Young had one thousand five hundred acres of land.  He had several farms.  Little Hill and Creek farms.  They had a rock walk from the kitchen to the house.  I slept in a little trunnel bed under my mother’s mistress’ bed.  The bed was corded and had a crank.  They used no slats in them days.  We called Master Bob Young’s wife Miss Nippy; her name was Par/nel/i/py.  They was good old people.  His boys was rough.  They drunk and wasted the property.

“The white folks had feather beds and the slaves had grass beds.  We’d pull grass and cure it.  It made a’good bed.  Miss Nippy learnt us to work.  I know how to do near ’bout anything now.  She kept an ash hopper dripping all the time.  We made all our soap and lye hominy by the washpots full.  Mother cooked and washed and kept house.  She took the lead wid the house-work.  Miss Nippy ride off when she got ready.  Mother went right on wid the work.  I took care of the chickens and took the cows to the pasture.  I helped to wash clothes.  I stood on a block to turn meat.  We had a brick stove and a grill to fry meat on.  We had good clothes and good to eat.  After I was grown I’d go back to see Miss Nippy.  She raised me.  She say, ’I thought so much of your mama.  I love you.  I hope you live a long time.’  Mama had a hard time and Miss Nippy knowd all about it.

“After Bob Young bought mother he went back and bought Aunt Sarah.  They growed up together.  They could dance with a glass of water on their heads and never spill a drap.