“After the war my mammie come back from Texas and took me over to Dover to live but my old boss told her if she would let him have me he would raise and educate me like his own children.  When I got back the old boss already had a boy so I went to live with one of his sons.  He told me it was time for me to learn how to work.  My boss was rough but he was good to me and taught me how to work.  The old boss had five sons in the army and all was wounded except one.  One of them was shot through and through in the battle of Oak Hill.  He got a furlough and come back and died.  I left my white folks in 1869 and went to farming for myself up in Hartman bottom.  I married when I was about seventeen years old.

“They though’ a house near us was hainted.  Nobody wanted to live in it so they went to see what the noise was.  They found a pet coon with a piece of chain around his neck.  The coon would run across the floor and drag the chain.

“The children now are bad.  No telling that will be in the next twenty or thirty years everything is so changed now.

“I learnt to sing the hymns but never sang in the choir.  We sang ‘Dixie’, ‘John Brown’s Body Lies, etc.’, ‘Juanita’, ’Just Before the Battle, Mother’, ’Old Black Joe’.”

Interviewer:  Mrs. Bernice Bowden
Person interviewed:  Charlie Norris
                    122 Miller Street, Pine Bluff, Arkansas
Age:  81

“Born in slavery times?  That’s me, I reckon.  I was born October 1, 1857 in Arkansas in Union County.  Tom Murphy was old master’s name.

“Yes ma’am, I remember the first regiment left Arkansas—­went to Virginia.  I member our white folks had us packin’ grub out in the woods cause they was spectin’ the Yankees.

“I member when the first regiment started out.  The music boat come to the landin’ and played ‘Yankee Doodle.’  They carried all us chillun out there.

“After they fit they just come by from daylight till dark to eat.  They was death on bread.  My mother and Susan Murphy, that was the old lady herself, cooked bread for em.

“I stayed with the Murphys—­round on the plantation amongst em for five or six years after freedom.  Andrew Norris, my father’s old master, was the first sheriff of Ouachita County.

“My mother belonged to the Murphys and my father belonged to the Norrises and after freedom they never did go back together.

“My mother told me that Susan Murphy would suckle me when my mother was out workin’ and then my mother would suckle her daughter.

“I was raised up in the house you might say till I was a big nigger.  Had plenty to eat.  That’s one thing they did do.  I lived right amongst a settlement of what they called free niggers cause they was treated so well.

“Sometimes Susan Murphy got after me and whipped me and old Marse Tom would tell me to run and not let her whip me.  You see, I was worth $1,500 to him and he thought a lot of us black kids.