“After slavery we had to get in before night too.  If you didn’t, Ku Klux would drive you in.  They would come and visit you anyway.  They had something on that they could pour a lot of water in.  They would seem to be drinking the water and it would all be going in this thing.  They was gittin’ it to water the horses with, and when they got away from you they would stop and give it to the horses.  When he got you good and scared he would drive on away.  They would whip you if they would catch you out in the night time.

“My daddy had a horse they couldn’t catch.  It would run right away from you.  My daddy trained it so that it would run away from any one who would come near it.  He would take me up on that horse and we would sail away.  Those Ku Klux couldn’t catch him.  They never did catch him.  They caught many another one and whipped him.  My daddy was a pretty mean man.  He carried a gun and he had shot two or three men.  Those were bad times.  I got scared to go out with him.  I hated that business.  But directly it got over with.  It got over with when a lot of the Ku Klux was killed up.

“In slavery time they would raise children just like you would raise colts to a mare or calves to a cow or pigs to a sow.  It was just a business It was a bad thing.  But it was better than the county farm.  They didn’t whip you if you worked.  Out there at the county farm, they bust you open.  They bust you up till you can’t work.  There’s a lot of people down at the state farm at Cummins—­that’s where the farm is ain’t it—­that’s raw and bloody.  They wouldn’t let you come down there and write no history.  No Lawd!  You better not try it.  One half the world don’t know how the other half lives.  I’ll tell you one thing, if those Catholics could get control there would be a good time all over this world.  The Catholics are good folks.

“That gang that got after you if you let the sun go down while you were out—­that’s called the Pateroles.  Some folks call ’em the Ku Klux.  It was all the same old poor white trash.  They kept up that business for about ten years after the War.  They kept it up till folks began to kill up a lot of ’em.  That’s the only thing that stopped them.  My daddy used to make his own bullets.

“I’ve forgot who it is that told us that we was free.  Somebody come and told us we’re free now.  I done forgot who it was.

“Right after the War, my father farmed a while and after that he pulled a skiff.  You know Jim Lawson’s place.  He stayed on it twenty years.  He stayed at the Ferguson place about ten years.  They’re adjoining places.  He stayed at the Churchill place.  Widow Scott place, the Bojean place.  That’s all.  Have you been down in Argenta to the Roundhouse?  Churchill’s place runs way down to there.  It wasn’t nothing but farms in Little Rock then.  The river road was the only one there at that time.  It would take a day to cone down from Clear Lake with the cotton.  You would start ’round about midnight and you would get to Argenta at nine o’clock the next morning.  The roads was always bad.