“Visions?  Well, now I’m glad you asked me that.  I’ll take pleasure in tellin’ you.  Two years before I moved to this place I had a vision and I think I saw every colored person that was ever born in America, I believe.  I was on the east side of my house and this multitude of people was about four feet from me and they was as thick as sardines in a box and they was from little tots up.  Some had on derby hats and some was bareheaded.  I talked with one woman—­a brown skinned woman.  They was sitting on seats just like circus seats just as far as my eyes could behold.  Looked like they reached clear up in the sky.  That was when I fust went blind.  You’ve read about how John saw the multitude a hundred forty and four thousand and I think that was about one-fourth of what I saw.  They was happy and talkin’ and nothin’ but colored people—­no white people.

“Another vision I had.  I dreamed that the day that I lived to be sixty-five, that day I would surely die.  I thought the man that told me that was a little old dried-up white man up in the air and he had scales like the monkey and the cat weighed the cheese.  I thought he said, ’That day you will surely die,’ and one side of the scales tipped just a little and then I woke up.  You know I believed this strong.  That was in 1919 and I went out and bought a lot in Bellwood Cemetery.  But I’m still livin’.

“Old Major Crawley who owned what they called the Reader place on this side of the river, four miles east of Dexter, he was supposed to have money buried on his place.  He owned it during slavery and after he died his relatives from Mississippi come here and hired a carriage driver named Jackson Jones.  He married my second cousin.  And he took ’em up there to dig for the money, but I don’t know if they ever found it.  Some people said the place was ha’nted.”

Interviewer:  Mrs. Bernice Bowden
Person interviewed:  Sam Word
                   1122 Missouri, Pine Bluff, Arkansas
Age:  78

“I was born February 14, 1859.  My birthplace was Arkansas County.  Born in Arkansas and lived in Arkansas seventy-eight years.  I’ve kept up with my age—­didn’t raise it none, didn’t lower it none.

“I can remember all about the war, my memory’s been good.  Old man Bill Word, that was my old master, had a son named Tom Word and long about in ’63 a general come and pressed him into the Civil War.  I saw the Blue and the Gray and the gray clothes had buttons that said C.S., that meant secessioners.  Yankees had U.S. on their buttons.  Some of em come there so regular they got familiar with me.  Yankees come and wanted to hang old master cause he wouldn’t tell where the money was.  They tied his hands behind him and had a rope around his neck.  Now this is the straight goods.  I was just a boy and I was cryin’ cause I didn’t want em to hang old master.  A Yankee lieutenant comes up and made em quit—­they was just the privates you know.

“My old master drove a ox wagon to the gold fields in California in ’49.  That’s what they told me—­that was fore I was born.