“Mama was Dr. May’s cook.  We et out the dishes but I don’t know how all of ’em done their eating.  They eat at their houses.  Dr. May had a good size bunch of hands, not a big crowd.  We had straw beds.  Made new ones every summer.  In that country they didn’t ‘low you to beat yo’ hands up.  I heard my folks say that more’n one time.

“Dr. May come tole ’em it was freedom.  They could get land and stay—­all ’at wanted to.  All his old ones kept on wid him.  They sharecropped and some of them got a third.  I recollect him and worked for him.

“The Ku Klux didn’t bother none of us.  Dr. May wouldn’t ’low them on his place.

“Mama come out here in 1880.  I figured there better land out here and I followed her in 1881.  We paid our own ways.  Seem like the owners ought to give the slaves something but seem like they was mad ’cause they set us free.  Ma was named Viney May and pa, Nick May.

“Pa and four or five brothers was sold in Memphis.  He never seen his brothers no more.  They come to Arkansas.

“Pa and Dr. May went to war.  The Yankees drafted pa and he come back to Dr. May after he fit.  He got his lip split open in the War.  Dr. May come home and worked his slaves.  He didn’t stay long in war.

“I reckon they had plenty to eat at home.  They didn’t run to the stores every day ’bout starved to death like I has to do now.  Ma said they didn’t ’low the overseers to whoop too much er Dr. May would turn them off.

“Er horse stomped on my foot eight years ago.  I didn’t pay it much ’tention.  It didn’t hurt.  Blood-p’ison come in it and they took me to the horsepital and my leg had to come off, (at the knee).

“We have to go back to Africa to vote all the ’lections.  Voting brings up more hard feelings.”

Interviewer:  Pernella Anderson, colored.

EX-SLAVES

Yes I was born in slavery time.  I was born September 2, 1862 in the field under a tree.  I don’t know nothing about slavery.  I was too young to remember anything about slavery.  But I tell you this much, times ain’t like they used to be.  There was easy living back in the 18 hundred years.  People wore homemade clothes, what I mean homespun and lowell clothes.  My ma spun and weaved all of her cloth.  We wore our dresses down to our ankles in length and my dresses was called mother hubbards.  The skirts had about three yards circumference and we wore plenty of clothes under our dress.  We did not go necked like these folks do now.  Folk did not know how we was made.  We did not show our shape, we did not disgrace ourself back in 1800.  We wore our hair wrapped and head rags tied on our head.  I went barefooted until I was a young missie then I wore shoes in the winter but I still went barefooted in the summer.  My papa was a shoemaker so he made our shoes.  We raised everything that we ate when I was a chap.  We ate a plenty.  We raised plenty of whippowell peas.  That was the only kind of peas there was then.  We raised plenty Moodie sweet potatoes they call them nigger chokers now.  We had cows so we had plenty of milk and butter.  We cooked on the fireplace.  The first stove I cooked on was a white woman’s stove, that was 1890.