“My daddy’s name was Chance Ayers and my mammy’s name was Mary Ayers.  So I guess the white folks was named Ayers.

“White folks was good to us.  Had plenty to eat, plenty to wear, plenty to drink.  That was water.  Didn’t have no whisky.  Might a had some but they didn’t give us none.

“Oh, yes ma’am, I got plenty kin folks.  Oh, yes ma’am, I wish I was back there but I can’t get back.  I been here so long I likes Arkansas now.

“My mammy give me away after freedom and I ain’t seed her since.  She give me to a colored man and I tell you he was a devil untied.  He was so mean I run away to a white man’s house.  But he come and got me and nearly beat me to death.  Then I run away again and I ain’t seed him since.

“I had a hard time comin’ up in this world but I’m livin’ yet, somehow or other.

“I didn’t work in no field much.  I washed and ironed and cleaned up the house for the white folks.  Yes ma’am!

“No ma’am, I ain’t never been married in my life.  I been ba’chin’.  I get along so fine and nice without marryin’.  I never did care anything ’bout that.  I treat the women nice—­speak to ’em, but just let ’em pass on by.

“I never went to school in my life.  Never learned to read or write.  If I had went to school, maybe I’d know more than I know now.

“These young folks comin’ on is pretty rough.  I don’t have nothin’ to do with ’em—­they is too rough for me.  They is a heap wuss than they was in my day—­some of ’em.

“I gets along pretty well.  The Welfare gives me eight dollars a month.”

Interviewer:  Samuel S. Taylor
Person interviewed:  James Bertrand
                    1501 Maple Street, Little Rock, Arkansas
Age:  68

[HW:  “Pateroles” Botlund Father]

“I have heard my father tell about slavery and about the Ku Klux Klan bunch and about the paterole bunch and things like that.  I am sixty-eight years old now.  Sixty-eight years old!  That would be about five years after the War that I was born.  That would be about 1870, wouldn’t it?  I was born in Jefferson County, Arkansas, near Pine Bluff.

“My father’s name was Mack Bertrand.  My mother’s name was Lucretia.  Her name before she married was Jackson.  My father’s owners were named Bertrands.  I don’t know the name of my mother’s owners.  I don’t know the names of any of my grandparents.  My father’s owners were farmers.

“I never saw the old plantation they used to live on.  My father never told me how it looked.  But he told me he was a farmer—­that’s all.  He knew farming.  He used to tell me that the slaves worked from sunup till sundown.  His overseers were very good to him.  They never did whip him.  I don’t know that he was ever sold.  I don’t know how he met my mother.

“Out in the field, the man had to pick three hundred pounds of cotton, and the women had to pick two hundred pounds.  I used to hear my mother talk about weaving the yarn and making the cloth and making clothes out of the cloth that had been woven.  They used to make everything they wore—­clothes and socks and shoes.