“I’m a blacksmith; my pa was a fine blacksmith.  He was a blacksmith in the old war (Civil War).  He never got a pension.  He said he loss his sheep skin.  His owners was George and Bill Whitaker.  Mother always said her owners was pretty good.  I never heard my pa speak of them in that way.  They was both born in Tennessee.  She was never sold.  I was born in Murray County, Tennessee too.  My mother was named Fronie Whitaker and pa Ike Whitaker.  Mother had eleven children.  My wife is a full-blood Cherokee Indian.  We have ten children and twenty-three grandchildren.

“I don’t have a word to say against the times; they are close at present.  Nor a word to say about the next generation.  I think times is progressing and I think the people are advancing some too.”

[TR:  The following is typed, but scratched out by hand:] Interviewer’s Comment

Some say his wife is a small part African.

Interviewer:  Beulah Sherwood Hagg
Person interviewed:  Mrs. Julia A. White, 3003 Cross St.,
                    Little Rock, Ark. 
Age:  79

Idiom and dialect are lacking in this recorded interview.  Mrs. White’s conversation was entirely free from either.  On being questioned about this she explained that she was reared in a home where fairly correct English was used.

My cousin Emanuel Armstead could read and write, and he kept the records of our family.  At one time he was a school director.  Of course, that was back in the early days, soon after the war closed.

My father was named James Page Jackson because he was born on the old Jackson plantation in Lancaster county, Virginia.  He named one of his daughters Lancaster for a middle name in memory of his old home.  Clarice Lancaster Jackson was her full name.  A man named Galloway bought my father and brought him to Arkansas.  Some called him by the name of Galloway, but my father always had all his children keep the name Jackson.  There were fourteen of us, but only ten lived to grow up.  He belonged to Mr. Galloway at the time of my birth, but even at that, I did not take the name Galloway as it would seem like I should.  My father was a good carpenter; he was a fine cook, too; learned that back in Virginia.  I’ll tell you something interesting.  The first cook stove ever brought to this town was one my father had his master to bring.  He was cook at the Anthony House.  You know about that, don’t you?  It was the first real fine hotel in Little Rock.  When father went there to be head cook, all they had to cook on was big fireplaces and the big old Dutch ovens.  Father just kept on telling about the stoves they had in Virginia, and at last they sent and got him one; it had to come by boat and took a long time.  My father was proud that he was the one who set the first table ever spread in the Anthony House.

You see, it was different with us, from lots of slave folks.  Some masters hired their slaves out.  I remember a drug store on the corner of Main and Markham; it was McAlmont’s drug store.  Once my father worked there; the money he earned, it went to Mr. Galloway, of course.  He said it was to pay board for mother and us little children.