“They fed good on Alex Rogers’ place.  They’d buy a barrel of coffee, a barrel molasses, a barrel sugar.  Some great big barrels.

“Alex Rogers wasn’t a good man.  He’d tell them to steal a hog and git home wid it.  If they ketch you over there they’ll whoop you.  He’d help eat hogs they’d steal.

“One time papa was working on the roads.  The neighbor man and road man was fixing up their eating.  He purty nigh starved on that road work.  He was hired out.

“Mama and papa spoke like they was mighty glad to get sat free.  Some believed they’d git freedom and others didn’t.  They had places they met and prayed for freedom.  They stole out in some of their houses and turned a washpot down at the door.  Another white man, not Alex Rogers, tole mama and papa and a heap others out in the field working.  She say they quit and had a regular bawl in the field.  They cried and laughed and hollered and danced.  Lot of them run offen the place soon as the man tole ’em.  My folks stayed that year and another year.

“What is I been doing?  Ast me is I been doing?  What ain’t I been doing be more like it.  I raised fifteen of my own children.  I got four living.  I living wid one right here in dis house wid me now.  I worked on the farm purty nigh all my life.  I come to dis place.  Wild, honey, it was!  I come in 1901.  Heap of changes since then.

“Present times—­Not as much union ’mongst young black and white as the old black and white.  They growing apart.  Nobody got nothin’ to give.  No work.  I used to could buy second-handed clothes to do my little children a year for a little or nothin’.  Won’t sell ’em now nor give ’em ’way neither.  They don’t work hard as they used to.  They say they don’t git nothin’ outen it.  They don’t want to work.  Times harder in winter ’cause it cold and things to eat killed out.  I cans meat.  We dry beef.  In town this Nickellodian playing wild wid young colored folks—­these Sea Bird music boxes.  They play all kind things.  Folks used to stay home Saturday nights.  Too much running ’round, excitement, wickedness in the world now.  This generation is worst one.  They trying to cut the Big Apple dance when we old folks used to be down singing and praying, ’Cause dis is a wicked age times is bad and hard.”

Interviewer’s Comment

Mulatto, clean, intelligent.

Interviewer:  Mrs. Zillah Cross Peel
Person interviewed:  “Aunt Adeline” Age:  89
Home:  101 Rock Street, Fayetteville, Arkansas

“I was born a slave about 1848, in Hickmon County, Tennessee,” said Aunt Adeline who lives as care taker in a house at 101 Rock Street, Fayetteville, Arkansas, which is owned by the Blakely-Hudgens estate.

Aunt Adeline has been a slave and a servant in five generations of the Parks family.  Her mother, Liza, with a group of five Negroes, was sold into slavery to John P.A.  Parks, in Tennessee, about 1840.