“I member when they had the fight at Jenkins Ferry.  Old Steele had 30,000 and he come down to take Little Rock, Pine Bluff and others.  Captain Webb with 1,500 Rebels was followin’ him and when they got to Saline River they had a battle.

“The next Sunday my father carried all us children and some of the white folks to see the battle field.  I member the dead was lyin’ in graves, just one row after another and hadn’t even been covered up.

“Oh yes, I can tell all bout that.  Nother time there was four hundred fifty colored and five white Yankee soldiers come and ask my father if old mistress treated us right.  We told em we had good owners.  I never was so scared in my life.  Them colored soldiers was so tall and so black and had red eyes.  Oh yes ma’m, they had on the blue uniforms.  Oh, we sure was fraid of em—­you know them eyes.

“They said, ’Now uncle, we want you to tell the truth, does she feed you well?’ My ma did all the cookin’ and we had good livin’.  I tole my daughter we fared ten thousand times better than now.

“I come up in the way of obedience.  Any time I wanted to go, had to go to old mistress and she say, ‘Don’t let the sun go down on you.’  And when we come home the sun was in the trees.  If you seed the sun was goin’ down on you, you run.

“I ain’t goin’ tell nothin’ but the truth.  Truth better to live with and better to die with.

“Some of the folks said they never seed a biscuit from Christmas to Christmas but we had em every day.  Never seed no sodie till peace was declared—­used saleratus.

“In my comin’ up it was Whigs and Democrats.  Never heard of no Republicans till after the war.  I’ve seed a man get upon that platform and wipe the sweat from his brow.  I’ve seed em get to fight in’ too.  That was done at our white folks house—­arguin’ politics.

“I never did go to school.  I married right after the war you know.  What you talkin’ bout—­bein’ married and goin’ to school?  I was housekeepin’:  Standin’ right in my own light and didn’t know it.”

Interviewer:  Mrs. Bernice Bowden
Person interviewed:  Annie Page
                    412-1/2 Pullen Street, Pine Bluff, Arkansas
Age:  86

“I was born 1852, they tell me, on the fifteenth of March.  I was workin’ a good while ’fore surrender.

“Bill Jimmerson was my old master.  He was a captain in Marmaduke’s army.  Come home on thirty days furlough once and he and Daniel Carmack got into some kind of a argument ’bout some whisky and Daniel Carmack stabbed him with a penknife.  Stabbed him three times.  He was black as tar when they brought him home.  The blood had done settled.  Oh Lawd, that was a time.

“My eyes been goin’ blind ’bout six years till I got so I can’t excern (discern) anything.

“Old miss used to box me over the head mightily and the colored folks used to hit me over the head till seem like I could hear a bell for two or three days.  Niggers ain’t got no sense.  Put ’em in authority and they gits so uppity.