“I get ten dollars and I sells sassafras and little things along to help out.  My wife died.  My two sons left just before the World War.  I never hear from them.  I married since then.

“Present times—­I can’t figure it out.  Seems like a stampede.  Not much work to do.  If I was young I reckon I could find something to do.

“Present generation—­Seem like they are more united.  The old ones have to teach the young ones what to do.  They don’t listen all the time.  The times is strange.  People’s children don’t do them much good now seems like.  They waste most all they make some way.  They don’t make it regular like we did farming.  The work wasn’t regular farming but Saturday was ration day and we got that.”

Interviewer:  Miss Irene Robertson
Person interviewed:  Josephine Ann Barnett,
                    R.F.D., De Valls Bluff, Arkansas
Age:  75 or 80

“I do not knows my exact age.  I judge I somewhere between 75 and 80 years old.  I was born close to Germantown, Tennessee.  We belong, that is my mother, to Phillip McNeill and Sally McNeill.  My mother was a milker.  He had a whole heap of hogs, cattle and stock.  That not all my mother done.  She plowed.  Children done the churnin’.

“The way it all come bout I was the onliest chile my mother had.  Him and Miss Sallie left her to help gather the crop and they brought me in the buggy wid them.  I set on a little box in the foot of the buggy.  It had a white umbrella stretched over it.  Great big umbrella run in between them.  It was fastened to the buggy seat.  When we got to Memphis they loaded the buggy on the ship.  I had a fine time coming.  When we got to Bucks Landing we rode to his place in the buggy.  It is 13 miles from here (De Valls Bluff).  In the fall nearly all his slaves come out here.  Then when my mother come on.  I never seen my papa after I left back home [TR:  Crossed out:  (near Germantown)].  My father belong to Boston Hack.  He wouldn’t sell and Mr. McNeill wouldn’t sell and that how it come.

“I muster been five or six years old when I come out here to Arkansas.  My grandma was a midwife.  She was already out here.  She had to come with the first crowd cause some women was expecting.  I tell you it sho was squally times.  This country was wild.  It was different from Tennessee or close to Germantown where we come from.  None of the slaves liked it but they was brought.

“The war come on direckly after we got here.  Several families had the slaves drove off to Texas to save them.  Keep em from following the Yankee soldiers right here at the Bluff off.  I remember seein’ them come up to the gate.  My mother and two aunts went.  His son and some more men drove em.  After freedom them what left childern come back.  I stayed with my grandma while they gone.  I fed the chickens, shelled corn, churned, swept.  I done any little turns they sent me to do.

“One thing I remember happened when they had scrimmage close—­it mighter been the one on Long Prairie—­they brought a young boy shot through his lung to Mr. Phillip McNeill’s house.  He was a stranger.  He died.  I felt so sorry for him.  He was right young.  He belong to the Southern army.  The Southern army nearly made his place their headquarters.