I never did live in no town; always been a country nigger.  I always worked for white folks, nearly.  Never mixed up in big crowds of colored; stayed to myself.  I never been arrested in my whole life; I never got jailed for nothing.  What else you want to know, Miss?

About these days, and the young folks!  Well, I ain’t saying about the young folks; but they—­no, I wouldn’t say. (He eyed a boy working with a saw.) Well, I will say, they don’t believe in hard work.  Iffen they can make a living easy, they will.  In old days, I was young and didn’t have nothing to worry about.  These days you have to keep studying where you going to get enough to eat.

Interviewer:  Samuel S. Tayler
Person interviewed:  Henry Blake
                    Rear of 1300 Scott Street, Little Rock, Arkansas
Age:  80, or more Occupation:  Farming and junk, when able

[HW:  Drove a “Horsepower Gin Wagon”]

“I was born March 16, 1863, they tell me.  I was born in Arkansas right down here on Tenth and Spring Streets in Little Rock.  That was all woods then.  We children had to go in at night.  You could hear the wolves and the bears and things.  We had to make a big fire at night to keep the wolves and varmints away.

“My father was a skiffman.  He used to cross the Arkansas River in a ferry-boat.  My father’s name was Doc Blake.  And my mother’s name was Hannah Williams before she morried.

“My father’s mother’s name was Susie somethin’; I done forgot.  That is too far back for me.  My mother’s mother was named Susie—­Susie Williams.

“My father’s master was named Jim Paty.  My father was a slavery man.  I was too.  I used to drive a horsepower gin wagon in slavery time.  That was at Pastoria Just this side of Pine Bluff—­about three or four miles this side.  Paty had two places-one about four miles from Pine Bluff and the other about four miles from England on the river.

“When I was driving that horsepower gin wagon.  I was about seven or eight years old.  There wasn’t nothin’ hard about it.  Just hitch the mules to one another’s tail and drive them ’round and ’round.  There wasn’t no lines.  Just hitch them to one another’s tail and tell them to git up.  You’d pull a lever when you wanted them to stop.  The mule wasn’t hard to manage.

“We ginned two or three bales of cotton a day.  We ginned all the summer.  It would be June before we got that cotton all ginned.  Cotton brought thirty-five or forty cents a pound then.

“I was treated nicely.  My father and mother were too.  Others were not treated so well.  But you know how Negroes is.  They would slip off and go out.  If they caught them, he would put them in a log hut they had for a jail.  If you wanted to be with a woman, you would have to go to your boss man and ask him and he would let you go.

“My daddy was sold for five hundred dollars—­put on the block, up on a stump—­they called it a block.  Jim Paty sold him.  I forget the name of the man he was sold to—­Watts, I think it was.