“My mother cooked.  Me and Dave Johnson’s boy nursed together.  When they had company, Miss Luiza was so modest she wouldn’t let Tobe have ‘titty’.  He would come lead my mother behind the door and pull at her till she would take him and let him nurse.  She said he would lead her behind the door.

“I don’t remember freedom.  I know the Ku Klux was bad around Augusta, Arkansas.  One time when I was little a crowd of Ku Klux come at about dusk.  They told Dave Johnson they wanted water.  He told them there was a well full but not bother that woman and her children in the kitchen.  Dave Johnson was a Ku Klux himself.  They went on down the road and met a colored woman.  She knowed their horses.  She called some of them by name and they let her alone.

“One time a colored man was settin’ by the fire.  His wife was sick in bed.  He seen the Ku Klux coming and said ’Lord God, here comes the devil.’  He run off.  They didn’t bother her.  She told them she was sick.  When she got up and well she wouldn’t live with that husband no more.

“Up at Bowens Ridge they took some colored men out one night and if they said they was Republicans they let them go but if they said they was Democrats they whooped them so hard they nearly killed some of them.  Some said they was bushwhackers or carpet baggers and not Ku Klux.

“I am a country-raised woman.  I had a light stroke and cain’t work in the field.  I get $8.00 and commodities.  I like to live here very well.  I don’t meddle with young folks business.  Seems like they do mighty foolish things to me.  Times been changing ever since I come in this world.  It is the people cause the times to change.  I wouldn’t know how to start to vote.”

Interviewer:  Miss Irene Robertson
Person interviewed:  Nettie Van Buren, Clarendon, Arkansas
                    Ex school-teacher
Age:  62

“My mother was named Isabel Porter Smith.  She come from Springville.  Rev. Porter brought her to Mississippi close to Holly Springs.  Then she come to Batesville, Arkansas.  He owned her.  He was a circuit rider.  I think he was a Presbyterian minister.  I heard her say they brought her to Arkansas when she was a small girl.  She nursed and cooked all the time.  After freedom she went with Reverend Porter’s relatives to work for them.  I know so very little about what she said about slavery.

“My father was raised in North Carolina.  His name was Jerry Smith and his master he called Judge Smith.  My father made all he ever had farmin’.  He knew how to raise cotton.  He owned a home.  This is his home (a nice home on River Street in Clarendon) and 80 acres.  He sold this farm two miles from here after he had paralysis, to live on.

“My parents had two girls and two boys.  They all dead but me.  My mother’s favorite song was “Oh How I Love Jesus Because He First Loved Me.”  They come here because my mother had a brother down here and she heard it was such fine farmin’ land.