into the pasture from the lot down back of the barn.  She say, ‘Old missis whip me.  This ain’t right.’  He’d laugh.  Said she bore three of his children in a room in the same house his family lived in.  She lived in the same house.  She had a room so as she could build fires and cook breakfast by four o’clock sometimes, she said.  She was so glad freedom come on and soon as she heard it she took her children and was gone, she said.  She had no use for him.  She was scared to death of him.  She learned to pray and prayed for freedom.  She died in Cold Water, Mississippi.  She was so glad freedom come on before her children come on old enough to sell.  Part white children sold for more than black children.  They used them for house girls.

“I don’t know Ku Klux stories enough to tell one.  These old tales leave my mind.  I’m 66 and all that was before my time.

“Times is strange—­hard, too.  But the way I have heard they had to work and do and go I hardly ever do grumble.  I’ve heard so much.  I got children and I do the best I can by them.  That is all I can do or say.”

Interviewer:  Samuel S. Taylor
Person interviewed:  R.B.  Anderson
                    Route 4, Box 68 (near Granite)
                    Little Rock, Arkansas
Age:  75

[HW:  The Brooks-Baxter War]

“I was born in Little Rock along about Seventeenth and Arch Streets.  There was a big plantation there then.  Dr. Wright owned the plantation.  He owned my mother and father.  My father and mother told me that I was born in 1862.  They didn’t know the date exactly, so I put it the last day in the year and call it December 30, 1862.

“My father’s name was William Anderson.  He didn’t go to the War because he was blind.  He was ignorant too.  He was colored.  He was a pretty good old man when he died.

“My mother’s name was Minerva Anderson.  She was three-fourths Indian, hair way down to her waist.  I was in Hot Springs blacking boots when my mother died.  I was only about eight or ten years old then.  I always regretted I wasn’t able to do anything for my mother before she died.  I don’t know to what tribe her people belonged.

“Dr. Wright was awful good to his slaves.

“I don’t know just how freedom came to my folks.  I never heard my father say.  They were set free, I know.  They were set free when the War ended.  They never bought their freedom.

“We lived on Tenth and near to Center in a one-room log house.  That is the earliest thing I remember.  When they moved from there, my father had accumulated enough to buy a home.  He bought it at Seventh and Broadway.  He paid cash for it—­five hundred and fifty dollars.  That is where we all lived until it was sold.  I couldn’t name the date of the sale but it was sold for good money—­about three thousand eight hundred dollars, or maybe around four thousand.  I was a young man then.

“I remember the Brooks-Baxter War.