“My grandfather went to war as bodyguard for his master, but I was with the Yankees.

“I remember when the Ku Klux come to my grandmother’s house.  They nearly scared us to death.  I run and hid under the bed.  They didn’t do nothin’, just the looks of ’em scared us.  I know they had the old folks totin’ water for ’em.  Seemed like they couldn’t get enough.

“After the war I come home and went to farmin’.  Then I steamboated for four years.  I was on the Kate Adams, but I quit just ’fore it burned, ’bout two or three weeks.

“I never went to school a minute in my life.  I had a chance to go but I just didn’t.

“No’m I can’t remember nothin’ else.  It’s been so long it done slipped my memory.”

Interviewer:  Mrs. Bernice Bowden
Person interviewed:  John Young
                    923 E. Fifteenth, Pine Bluff, Arkansas
Age:  89

“I know I was born in Arkansas.  The first place I recollect I was in Arkansas.

“I was a drummer in the Civil War.  I played the little drum.  The bass drummer was Rheuben Turner.

“I run off from home in Drew County.  Five or six of us run off here to Pine Bluff.  We heard if we could get with the Yankees we’d be free, so we run off here to Pine Bluff and got with some Yankee soldiers—­the twenty-eighth Wisconsin.

“Then we went to Little Rock and I j’ined the fifty-seventh colored infantry.  I thought I was good and safe then.

“We went to Fort Smith from Little Rock and freedom come on us while we was between New Mexico and Fort Smith.

“They mustered us out at Fort Leavenworth and I went right back to my folks in Drew County, Monticello.

“I’ve been a farmer all my life till I got too old.”