wouldn’t work and lay out in the woods, or they wouldn’t mind they soon got sold off.  They mated a heap of them and sold them for speculation.  No mam I didn’t like slavery.  We had plenty to eat but they worked for all they got.  Had good fires and good warm houses and good clothes but I did not like the way they give out the provisions.  They blowed a horn and measured out the weeks paratta for every family.  They cooked at the cabins for their own families.  There was several springs and a deep rock walled well at old mistress’ house.  Old mistress always lived in a fine house.  I slept at my mother’s house nearly all the time.  She had a big family.  White folks raised me up to play with Ed till I thought I was white.  They taught me to do right and I ain’t forgot it.  I never was arrested.  I married three times, bought three marriage license all in Prairie County.  All three wives died.

I owns dis house ’cept a mortgage of $50.  One of my boys got in a difficulty.  I don’t know where he is to get him to pay it off.  The other boy he’s not man enough either to pay it off.

I never did know jess when the Civil War did close.  I kept hearing ’em say we are free.  I didn’t see much difference only when Colonel Williams come back times wasn’t so hard.  Then he sold out and come to Arkansas.  Then each family raised his own hogs and chickens and finally got to have cows.

I was as scared of the Ku Klux Klan as of rattlesnakes.  In Tennessee they come up the road and back just after dark.  They rode all night and if you wasn’t on your master’s own land and didn’t have a pass from him or the overseer they would set the dogs on you and run you home.  Sometimes they would whip them.  Take them home to the old master.  I never heard of no uprisings.  People loved each other better then than now.  They didn’t have so much idle time.  There was always some work to be doing.  When they didn’t mind they run them with dogs and whipped them.  The overseer and paddyrollers seed about that.  The first day of the year everybody went up to hear the rules and see who was to be the overseer.  Then they knowed what to do for the year.  They never did kill nobody.  No mam that was too costly.  They had work according to their strength and age.  The Ku Klux was to keep order.

I been living in Hazen forty or fifty years.  All I ever have done was farm sometimes one-half-for-the-other and sometimes on share-crop.

I have voted but not lately.  I votes a Republican ticket.  I votes that way because it was the Republicans that set us free, I always heard it said.  I jess belongs to that party.  Seems lack we gets easier times when the Democrats reign.  Colonel Williams was a Democrat.

The young folks are not as well off as I was at their age.  They are restless and won’t work unless they gets big pay and they spends the money too easy.  The colored people are too idle and orderless.  They fight and hate one another and roam around in too much confusion.