“After it was all over Master Joe got ready to go back to Florida.  He took Warley and Jenny with him.  They was children he had had by a black woman—­you know folks did such things in them days.  He asked the rest of us if they wanted to go back too.  But my folks made up their minds they didn’t.  You see, they didn’t know how they’d get along and how long it would take them to pay for the trip back, so they stayed right where they was.

“Lots of ’em went to Rondo and some of us worked for Herb Jeans—­he lived farther up Red River.  After my mother died I was with my grandmother.  She washed and cooked for Herb Jeans’s family.  I stayed on with her, helped out until I got married.  I was about fifteen when that time come.

“My man owned his place.  Sure he did.  Owned it when I married him.  He owned it himself and farmed it good.  Yes ma’am we stayed with the land.  He made good crops—­corn and cotton, mostly.  Course we raised potatoes and the truck we needed—­all stuff like that.  Yes, ma’am we had thirteen children.  Just three of them’s living.  All of them is boys.

“Yes ma’am we got along good.  My husband made good crops and we got along just good.  But ’bout eight years ago my husband he got sick.  So he sold out the farm—­sold out everything.  Then he come here.

“Before he died he spent every last cent—­every last cent—­left me to get along the very best way I kin.  I stays with my son.  He takes care of me.  He don’t make much, but he does the best he kin.

“No ma’am, I likes living down in the country.  Down there near Red River it’s soft and sandy.  Up here in Hot Springs the rocks tear up your feet.  If you’s country raised—­you like the country.  Yes ma’am, you like the country.”

As she left the interviewer handed her a quarter.  At first the old woman’s face was expressionless.  But she moved the coin nearer to her eyes and a smile broke and widened until her whole face was a wrinkle of joy.  When she turned in the doorway, the interviewer noticed that the hand jammed into an apron pocket was clutched into a possessive fist, cradling the precious twenty five cents.

Interviewer:  Mrs. Bernice Bowden
Person interviewed:  R.F.  Parker
                    619 N. Hickory, Pine Bluff, Arkansas
Age:  76

“I was born in ’62.  I reckon I was born in slavery times.  Born in Ripley County, Missouri.  Old man Billy Parker was my master, and my young master was Jim Parker.

“They bought my mother in Tennessee when she was a child.  I wasn’t big enough to remember much about slavery but I was big enough to know when they turned my mother loose, and we come to Lawrence County, Arkansas.

“I remember my mother sayin’ she had to plow while her young master, Jim Parker, was off to war, but I don’t know what side he was on.

“I remember seein’ some soldiers ridin’ down the road, about seventy-five of ’em.  I know I run under a corn pen and hid.  I thought they was after me.  They stopped right there and turned their horses loose ’round that pen.  I can remember that all right.  They went in the white folks’ house and took a shotgun.  I know I remember hearin’ mama talk about it.  I think they had on blue clothes.