“When my mother and father were living on the plantation, they lived in an old frame building.  A portion of it was log.  My father stayed with the Calverts—­his wife’s white folks.  At first old man Webb sold him to them; then he bought him back and bought my mother too.  They were together when freedom came.  You know they auctioned you off in slavery time.  Every year, they would, they put you up on the auction block and buy and sell.  That was down in Georgia.  We was in Georgia when we was freed—­in Atlanta.  My father and mother had fourteen children altogether.  My mother died the year after we came out here.  That would be about 1875.  I never had but three children because my wife died early.  Two of them are dead.

“Right after freedom, my father plaited baskets and mats.  He shucked mops, put handles on rakes and did things like that in addition to his farming.  He was a blacksmith all the time too.  He used to plait collars for mules.  He farmed and got his harvests in season.  The other things would be a help to him between times.

“My father came here because he thought that there was a better situation here than in Georgia.  Of course, the living was better there because they had plenty of fruit.  Then he worked on a third and fourth.  He got one bale of cotton out of every three he made.  The slaves left many a plantation and they would grow up in weeds.  When a man would clear up the ground like this and plant it down in something, he would get all he planted on it.  That was in addition to the ground that he would contract to plant.  He used to plant rice, peas, potatoes, corn, and anything else he wanted too.  It was all his’n so long as it was on extra ground he cleared up.

“But they said, ‘Cotton grows as high as a man in Arkansas.’  Then they paid a man two dollars fifty cents for picking cotton here in Arkansas while they just paid about forty cents in Georgia.  So my father came here.  Times was good when we come here.  The old man cleared five bales of cotton for himself his first year, and he raised his own corn.  He bought a pony and a cow and a breeding hog out of the first year’s money.  He died about thirty-five years ago.

“When I was coming along I did public work after I became a grown man.  First year I made crops with him and cleared two bales for myself at twelve and a half cents a pound.  The second year I hired out by the month at forty-five dollars per month and board.  I had to buy my clothes of course.  After seven years I went to doing work as a millwright here in Arkansas.  I stayed at that eighteen months.  Then I steamboated.