“I am the youngest child in the bunch and all the older ones are dead.  My mother was the mother of about thirteen children.  Ten or more of them were born in slavery.  My mother worked practically all the time in the house.  She was a house worker mostly.

“My father was bothered by the pateroles.  You see they wouldn’t let you go about if you didn’t have a pass.  Father would often get out and go ’round to see his friends.  The pateroles would catch him and lash him a little and let him go.  They never would whip him much.  My mother’s people were good to her.  She never did have any complaint about them.

“For amusement the slaves used to dance and go to balls.  Fiddle and dance!  I never heard my father speak of any other type of amusement.

“I don’t remember what the old man said about freedom coming.  Right after the War, he farmed.  He stayed right on with his master.  He left there before I was born and moved up near Pine Bluff where I was born.  The place my father was brought up on was near Pine Bluff too.  It was about twenty miles from Pine Bluff.

“I remember hearing him say that the Ku Klux Klan used to come to see us at night.  But father was always orderly and they never had no clue against him.  He never was whipped by the Ku Klux.

“My father never got any schooling.  He never could read or write.  He said that they treated him pretty fair though on the farms where he worked after freedom.  As far as he could figure, they didn’t cheat him.  I never had any personal experience with the Ku Klux.  I never did do any sharecropping.  I am a shoemaker.  I learned my trade from my father.  My father was a shoemaker as well as a farmer.  He used to tell me that he made shoes for the Negroes and for the old master too in slavery times.

“I have lived in Little Rock thirty years.  I was born right down here in Pine Bluff like I told you.  This is the biggest town—­a little bigger than Pine Bluff.  I run around on the railroad a great deal.  So after a while I just come here to this town and made it my home.”

Interviewer:  Miss Irene Robertson
Person Interviewed:  Alice Biggs
                    Holly Grove, Ark. 
Age:  “Bout 70”

“My mother come from Kentucky and my father from Virginia.  That where they born and I born close to Byihalia, Mississippi.  My father was Louis Anthony and mama name Charlotte Anthony.

“Grandma and her children was sold in a lump.  They wasn’t separated.  Grandpa was a waiter on the Confederate side.  He never come back.  He died in Pennsylvania; another man come back reported that.  He was a colored waitin’ man too.  Grandma been dead 49 years now.

“Mama was a wash woman and a cook.  They liked her.  I don’t remember my father; he went off with Anthony.  They lived close to Nashville, Tennessee.  He never come back.  Mama lived at Nashville a while.  The master they had at the closin’ of the war was good to grandma and mama.  It was Barnie Hardy and Old Kiss, all I ever heard her called.  They stayed on a while.  They liked us.  Held run us off if he’d had any bother.