Superstitious beliefs were strong in her and her tales of “hants” were to “her little white chilluns”, really true but hair-raising.  Then she would talk and live again the “days that are no more”, telling them of the happy prosperous, sunny land, in her negro dialect, and then tell of the ruin and desolation behind the Yankees; the hard times my white folks had in the reconstruction days—­negro and carpetbag rule; then give them glimpses of good—­much courage, some heart and human feeling; perhaps ending with an outburst of the negro spiritual, her favorite being, “Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home.”

After a faithful service of 106 years, Emiline died in 1932 at the home of Mrs. John G. High, a great-granddaughter of L.W.C.  Waddell living nine miles north of Lonoke, and the grown up great-great-grandchildren still miss Mammy.

Interviewer:  Samuel S. Taylor
Person interviewed:  Henry Waldon
                    816 Walnut Street.  North Little Rock, Arkansas
Age:  84

“I was plowing when they surrendered.  I had just learned to plow, and was putting up some land.  My young master come home and was telling me the War was ended and we was all free.

“I was born in Lauderdale County, Mississippi.  I think it was about 1854.  My father’s name [HW:  was] ——­, my mother’s [HW:  was] ——­, I knew them both.

“My mother belonged to Sterling and my father belonged to a man named Huff—­Richmond Huff.

“We lived in Lauderdale County.  Huff wouldn’t sell my father and my people wouldn’t sell my mother.  They lived about a mile or so apart.  They didn’t marry in them days.  The niggers didn’t, that is.  Father would just come every Saturday night to see my mother.  His cabin was about three miles from her’s.  We moved from Lauderdale County to Scott County, Mississippi, and that separated mama and papa.  They never did meet again.  Of course, I mean it was the white people that moved, but they carried mama and us with them.  Papa and mama never did meet again before freedom, and they didn’t meet afterwards.

“My mother had twelve children—­eight girls and four boys.  She had one by a man named Peter Smith.  She was away from her husband then.  She had four by my father—­two boys and two girls; my father’s name was Peter Huff.  My mother’s name was Mary Sterling.  I never did see my father no more after we moved away from him.

“My father made cotton and corn, plowed and hoed in slavery time.  His old master had seventy-five or eighty hands.  His old master treated him pretty rough.  He whipped them about working.  He never hired no overseer over them.  When he whipped them he took their shirts off and whipped them on their naked backs.  He cut the blood out of some of them.  He never did rub no salt nor vinegar in their wounds.  His youngest son done his overseeing.  He would whip them sometime but he wasn’t tight on them like some that I knowed.