heard him crying and ran in and carried him to her master.  He got the doctor and saved him.  My father’s mother didn’t do nothing after that but ’tend to that baby.  Her master loved those little boys and kept her and didn’t sell her because of them. (The underscoring is the interviewer’s—­ed.) That was his last master—­Warren.  Warren loved him more than his real father did.  Warren said he knew my father would never live after he had such a burn.  But he did live.  They never did let him do much work after the accident.

“I think my father’s master, Warren—­I can’t remember his first name—­farmed for a living.

“My father and mother had five children.  I don’t know how many brothers my father had.  I have heard my mother say she had four sisters.  I never heard her say nothin’ ’bout no brothers—­just sisters.

“I had six children.  Got three living and three dead.  They was grown though when they died.  I had three boys and three girls.  I got two boys living and one girl.  The boy in St. Louis does pretty well.  But the other in Little Rock doesn’t have much luck.  If he’d get out of Little Rock, he would find more to do.  The one in St. Louis don’t make much now because they done cut wages.  He’s a dining-car waiter.  This girl what’s here, she does all she can for me.  She has a husband and my husband is dead.  He’s been dead a long time.

“I belong to Bethel A.M.E.  Church.  You know where that is.  Rev. Campbell is a good man.  We had him eight years.  Then we got Brother Wilson one year and then they put Campbell back.

“I don’t know what to think of these young people.  Some of them is running wild.

“When I was working for myself, I was generally a maid.  But that is been a long time ago.  I washed and ironed and done laundry work when I was able a long time ago.  But I can’t do it now.  I can’t do it for myself now.  I washed for myself a little and I got the flu and got in bad health.  That was about four years ago.  I reckon it was the flu; I never did have no doctor.  When I take the least little cold, it comes back on me.”

Interviewer’s Comment

This old lady appears nearer eighty than sixty-nine, and she speaks with the sureness of an eyewitness.

Interviewer:  Mrs. Blanche Edwards
Person interviewed:  Emmeline Waddille (deceased)
                    Lonoke County, Arkansas
Age:  106

She immigrated with her owner, L.W.C.  Waddille, to Lonoke County in 1851, coming to Hickory Plains and then to Brownsville.  They moved from Hayburn, Georgia in a covered wagon drawn by oxen.

She lived with a great-granddaughter, Mrs. John High, seven miles north of Lonoke, until 1932, when she died.  She had nursed six generations of the Waddille family.  She was born a deaf-mute but her hearing and speech were restored many years ago when lightening struck a tree under which she was standing.