“I never saw a Ku Klux.  Mr. Williams kept us well protected.

“My mother’s mother couldn’t talk plain.  My mother talked tolerably plain.  She was a ‘Molly Glaspy’ woman.  My father had a loud heavy voice; you could hear him a long ways off.

“I have no home.  I am a widower.  I have no land.  I get a small check and commodities.

“I vote.  I haven’t voted in a long time.  I’m not educated to know how that would serve us best.”

Interviewer:  Samuel S. Taylor
Person interviewed:  Columbus Williams
         Temporary:  2422 Howard Street, Little Rock, Arkansas
         Permanent:  Box 12, Route 2, Ouachita County, Stevens, Arkansas
Age:  98

“I was born in Union County, Arkansas, in 1841, in Mount Holly.

“My mother was named Clora Tookes.  My father’s name is Jordan Tookes.  Bishop Tookes is supposed to be a distant relative of ours.  I don’t know my mother and father’s folks.  My mother and father were both born in Georgia.  They had eight children.  All of them are dead now but me.  I am the only one left.

“Old Ben Heard was my master.  He come from Mississippi, and brought my mother and father with him.  They were in Mississippi as well as in Georgia, but they were born in Georgia.  Ben Heard was a right mean man.  They was all mean ’long about then.  Heard whipped his slaves a lot.  Sometimes he would say they wouldn’t obey.  Sometimes he would say they sassed him.  Sometimes he would say they wouldn’t work.  He would tie them and stake them out and whip them with a leather whip of some kind.  He would put five hundred licks on them before he would quit.  He would buy the whip he whipped them with out of the store.  After he whipped them, they would put their rags on and go on about their business.  There wouldn’t be no such thing as medical attention.  What did he care.  He would whip the women the same as he would the men.

“Strip ’em to their waist and let their rags hang down from their hips and tie them down and lash them till the blood ran all down over their clothes.  Yes sir, he’d whip the women the same as he would the men.

“Some of the slaves ran away, but they would catch them and bring them back, you know.  Put the dogs after them.  The dogs would just run them up and bay them just like a coon or ’possum.  Sometimes the white people would make the dogs bite them.  You see, when the dogs would run up on them, they would sometimes fight them, till the white people got there and then the white folks would make the dogs bite them and make them quit fighting the dogs.

“One man run off and stayed twelve months once.  He come back then, and they didn’t do nothin’ to him.  ’Fraid he’d run off again, I guess.

“We didn’t have no church nor nothing.  No Sunday-schools, no nothin’.  Worked from Monday morning till Saturday night.  On Sunday we didn’t do nothin’ but set right down there on that big plantation.  Couldn’t go nowhere.  Wouldn’t let us go nowhere without a pass.  They had the paterollers out all the time.  If they caught you out without a pass, they would give you twenty-five licks.  If you outrun them and got home, on your master’s plantation, you saved yourself the whipping.