“Well, I’ll tell you.  I was old enough to know when they runned us to Texas so the Yankees couldn’t overtaken us.  We was in Texas when freedom come, I remember I was sittin on the fence when the soldiers in them blue uniforms with gold buttons come.  He said, “I come to tell you you is free”.  I didn’t know what it was all about but everybody was sayin’ “Thank God”.  I thought it was the judgment day and I was lookin’ for God.  I said to myself, I’m goin’ have some buttons like that some day.

“Colonel Williams was my marster.  My mother was a nurse and took care of the colored folks when they was sick.  I remember when people wasn’t given nothin’ but blue mass, calomel, castor oil and gruel, and every body was healthier than they is now.

“I’m the only one livin’ that my mother birthed in this world.  I was born here, but I been travelin’, I been to Memphis and around.

“No mam, I don’t remember nothin’ else.  I done tole you all I know.”

Interviewer:  Samuel S. Taylor
Person interviewed:  J.W.  Whitfield
                    3100 W. Seventeenth Street, Little Rock, Arkansas
Age:  About 60
Occupation:  Preacher

“My father’s name was Luke Whitfield.  He was sixty-three years old when he died in 1902.  He was twenty-six years old when the Civil War ended.  He was a slave.  There were three other boys in the family besides him.  No girls.

“His old mars’ name was Bill Carraway.  They lived at Nubian [HW:  New Bern], North Carolina.

“My father said that his work in slavery time was blacksmithing.  He had to fix the wagons and the plow too.  He said that was his work during the Civil War too.  He worked in the Confederate army too.

“I remember him saying how they whipped him when he ran off.  The overseer got after him to whip him and he and one of his friends ran off.  As they jumped over the fence to go into the woods the old mars hit my daddy with a cat-o-nine tails.  You see, they took a strap of harness leather and cut it into four thongs and then they took another and cut it into five thongs, and they tied them together.  When you got one blow you got nine and when you got five blows you got forty-five.  As his old mars hit him, he said.  ’I got him one, sir; it was a good one too, sir, and a go-boy.’[HW:  ?] But it was nine.

“My father told me how they married in slavery times.  They didn’t count marriage like they do now.  If one landowner had a girl and another wanted that girl for one of his men, they would give him her to wife.  When a boy-child was born out of this marriage they would reserve him for breeding purposes if he was healthy and robust.  But if he was puny and sickly they were not bothered about him.  Many a time if the boy was desirable, he was put on the stump and auctioned off by the time he was thirteen years old.  They called that putting him on the block.  Different ones would come and bid for him and the highest bidder would get him.