“When the war was over, Mr. Parks was still in the South and gave to each one of his slaves who did not want to come back to Arkansas so much money.  My uncle George came back with Mr. Parks and was given a good mountain farm of forty acres, which he put in cultivation and one of my uncle’s descendants still lives on the place.  My mother did not return to Arkansas but went on to Joplin, Missouri, and for more than fifty years, neither one of us knew where the other one was until one day a man from Fayetteville went into a restaurant in Joplin and ordered his breakfast, and my mother who was in there heard him say he lived in Fayetteville, Arkansas.  He lived just below the Hudgens home and when my mother enquired about the family he told her I was still alive and was with the family.  While neither of us could read nor write we corresponded through different people.  But I never saw her after I was eleven years old.  Later Mr. Hudgens went to Joplin to see if she was well taken care of.  She owned her own little place and when she died there was enough money for her to be buried.

“Civil War days are vivid to me.  The Courthouse which was then in the middle of the Square was burned one night by a crazy Confederate soldier.  The old men in the town saved him and then put him in the county jail to keep him from burning other houses.  Each family was to take food to him and they furnished bedding.  The morning I was to take his breakfast, he had ripped open his feather bed and crawled inside to get warm.  The room was so full of feathers when I got there that his food nearly choked him.  I had carried him ham, hot biscuits and a pot of coffee.

“After the War many soldiers came to my mistress, Mrs. Blakely, trying to make her free me.  I told them I was free but I did not want to go anywhere, that I wanted to stay in the only home that I had ever known.  In a way that placed me in a wrong attitude.  I was pointed out as different.  Sometimes I was threatened for not leaving but I stayed on.

“I had always been well treated by my master’s folks.  While we lived at the old Kidd place, there was a church a few miles from our home.  My uncle George was coachman and drove my master’s family in great splendor in a fine barouche to church.  After the war, when he went to his own place, Mr. Parks gave him the old carriage and bought a new one for the family.

“I can remember the days of slavery as happy ones.  We always had an abundance of food.  Old Aunt Martha cooked and there was always plenty prepared for all the white folks as well as the colored folks.  There was a long table at the end of the big kitchen for the colored folks.  The vegetables were all prepared of an evening by Aunt Martha with someone to help her.

“My mother seemed to have a gift of telling fortunes.  She had a brass ring about the size of a dollar with a handwoven knotted string that she used.  I remember that she told many of the young people in the neighborhood many strange things.  They would come to her with their premonitions.