“Freedom!  Master Campbell Jones come to us and said, ’You free this morning.  The war is over.’  It been over then but travel was slow.  ’You all can go back home, I’ll take you, or you can go root hog or die.’  We all got to gatherin’ up our belongings to come back home.  Tired of no wood neither, besides that hard work.  We all share cropped with Captain R. Campbell Jones two years.  I know that.  We got plenty wood without going five or six miles like in Texas.  After freedom folks got to changing ‘bout to do better I reckon.  I been farmin’ right here all my life.  We didn’t have a lot to eat out in Texas neither.  Mother was a farm woman too.

“I never seen a Ku Klux.  Bad Ku Klux sound sorter like good Santa Claus.  I heard ’em say it was real.  I never seen neither one.

“I did own ten acres of land.  I own a home now.

“My father drove a grub wagon from Memphis to Lost Swamp Bottom—­near Edmondson—­when they built this railroad through here.

“Father never voted.  I have voted several times.

“Present times is tougher now than before it come on.  Things not going like it ought somehow.  We wants more pension.  Us old folks needs a good living ’cause we ain’t got much more time down here.

“Present generation—­they are slack—­I means they slack on their parents, don’t see after them.  They can get farm work to do.  They waste their money more than they ought.  Some folks purty nigh hungry.  That is for a fact the way it is going.

Edmondson, Arkansas

“Master Henry Edmondson owned all the land to the Chatfield place to Lehi, Arkansas.  He owned four or five thousand acres of land.  It was bottoms and not cleared.  They had floods then, rode around in boats sometimes.  Colored folks could get land through Andy Flemming (colored man).  Mr. Henry Edmondson and whole family died with the yellow fever.  He had several children—­Miss Emma, Henry, and Will I knowed.  It is probably his father buried at far side of this town.  A rattlesnake bit him.  Lake Rest or Scantlin was a boat landing and that was where the nearest white folks lived to the Edmondsons.  I worked for Mr. Henry Edmondson, the one died with yellow fever.  He was easy to work for.  Land wasn’t cleared out much.  He was here before the Civil War.  Good many people, in fact all over there, died of yellow fever at Indian Mound.  Me and my brother waited on white folks all through that yellow fever plague.  Very few colored folks had it.  None of ’em I heered tell of died with it.  White folks died in piles.  Now when the smallpox raged the colored folks had it seem like heap more and harder than white folks.  Smallpox used to rage every few years.  It break out and spread.  That is the way so many colored folks come to own land and why it was named Edmondson.  Named for Master Henry—­Edmondson, Arkansas.