“You say I don’t seem to see very well.  Ha-ha!  I don’t see nuthin’ at all.  I’se been plum blind for 23 years.  I can’t see nothin’.  But I patches my own clothes.  You don’t know how I can thread the needle?  Look here.”  I asked him to let me see his needle threader.  He felt around in a drawer and pulled out a tiny little half arrow which he had made of a bit of tin with a pair of scissors and fine file.  He pushed this through the eye of the needle, then hooked the thread on it and pulled it back again threading his needle as fast as if he had good eyesight.  “This is a needle threader.  I made it myself.  Watch me thread a needle.  Can’t I do it as fast as if I had a head full of keen eyes?  My wife been gone twenty years.  She went blind too.  I had to do something.  My patches may not look so pretty but they sure holt (hold).

“You wants to know what I think of the way young folks is doing these days?  They’se goin’ to fast.  So is their papas and mammas.  Dey done forgot dey’s a God and a day of settlin’.  Den what dances pays de fiddler.  I got religion long time ago—­jined de Baptist church in 1870 and haven’t never got away from it.  I’se tried to tote fair with God and he’s done fair by me.

“Does I get a pension?  I shure do.  It was a lucky day when de Yankees got me.  Ef they hadn’t I don’t know what’d become of me.  After I went blind I had hard times.  Folks, white folks and all, brought me food.  But that wasn’t any good way to get along.  Sometimes I ate, sometimes I didn’t.  So some of my white, friends dug up my record with the Yankees and got me a pension.  Now I’m setting pretty for de rest of my life.  Yes—­O yes I’se older dan most folks get.  Still I may be still takin’ my grub here when some of these young whiskey drinkin razzin’ around young chaps is under the dirt.  It pays to I don know of any bad spots in me yet.  It pays to live honest, work hard, stay sober.  God only knows what some of these lazy, triflin’ drinkin’ young folks is comin’ to.”

Interviewer:  Pernella M. Anderson
Person interviewed:  Mose Banks
                    Douglas Addition, El Dorado, Arkansas
Age:  69

“My name is Mose Banks and I am sixty-nine years old.  I was born in 1869.  I was born four years after freedom but still I was a slave in a way.  My papa stayed with his old miss and master after freedom until he died and he just died in 1918, so we all stayed with him too.  I had one of the best easiest times in my life.  My master was name Bob Stevenson and he was a jewel.  Never meaned us, never dogged, never hit one of us in his life.  He bought us just like he bought my papa.  He never made any of the girls work in the field.  He said the work was too hard.  He always said splitting rails, bushing, plowing and work like that was for men.  That work makes no count women.

“The girls swept yards, cleaned the house, nursed, and washed and ironed, combed old miss’ and the children’s hair and cut their finger and toe nails and mended the clothes.  The womens’ job was to cook, attend to the cows, knit all the socks for the men and boys, spin thread, card bats, weave cloth, quilt, sew, scrub and things like that.