“Marriage wasn’t like now.  You would court a woman and jus’ go on and marry.  No license, no nothing.  Sometimes you would take up with a woman and go on with her.  Didn’t have no ceremony at all.  I have heard of them stepping over a broom but I never saw it.  Far as I saw there was no ceremony at all.

“When the slaves were freed they expected to get forty acres and a mule.  I never did hear of anybody gettin’ it.

“Right after the War, I worked on a farm with Ben Heard.  I stayed with him about three years, then I moved off with some other white folks.  I worked on shares.  First I worked for half and he furnished a team.  Then I worked on third and fourth and furnished my own team.  I gave the owner a third of the corn and a fourth of the cotton and kept the rest.  I kept that up several years.  They cheated us out of our part.  If they furnished anything, they would sure git it back.  Had everything so high you know.  I have farmed all my life.  Farmed till I got so old I couldn’t.  I never did own my own farm.  I just continued to rent.

“I never had any trouble about voting.  I voted whenever I wanted to.  I reckon it was about three years after the War when I began to vote.

“I never went to school.  One of the white boys slipped and learned me a little about readin’ in slave time.  Right after freedom come, I was a grown man; so I had to work.  I married about four or five years after the War.  I was just married once.  My wife is not living now.  She’s gone.  She’s been dead for about twelve years.

“I belong to the A.M.E.  Church and my membership is in the New Home Church out in the country in Ouachita County.”

Interviewer:  Samuel S. Taylor
Person interviewed:  Frank Williams
                    County Hospital, ward eleven, Little Rock, Arkansas
Age:  100, or more

“I’m a hundred years old.  I know I’m a hundred.  I know from where they told me.  I don’t know when I was born.

“I been took down and whipped many a time because I didn’t do my work good.  They took my pants down and whipped me just the same as if I’d been a dog.  Sometimes they would whip the people from Saturday night till Monday morning.

“I run off with the Yankees.  I was young then.  I was in the Civil War.  I don’t know how long I stayed in the army.  I ain’t never been back home since.  I wish I was.  I wouldn’t be in this condition if I was back home.

“Mississippi was my home.  I come up here with the Yankees and I ain’t never been back since.  Laconia, Mississippi was the place I used to be down there.  I been wanting to go home, but I couldn’t git off.  I want to git you to write there for me.  I belong to the Baptist church.  Write to the elders of the church.  I belong to the Mission Baptist Church on the other side of Rock Creek here.

“They just lived in log houses in slave time.

“I want to go back home.  They made me leave Laconia.