Slave Marriages on the Offord Plantation

“My mother said they just read ’em together, slavery times.  I think she said that the preacher married them on the Offord plantation.  They didn’t get no license.

Amusements

“They had quiltings and corn shuckings.  I don’t know what other amusements they had, but I know everything was pleasant on the Offord plantation.

“If slaves went out without a pass, my mother said her master wouldn’t allow them to beat on them when they come in.  They had plenty to eat, and they had substantial clothes, and they had a good fire.

Age

“I don’t know how old I am.  I was born before the war.  My father went to the war when it begun.  I had another brother that was born before the war.  He don’t remember nothin’ about my father.  I don’t neither.  I was too young.”

Interviewer’s Comment

Allowing for a year’s difference between the two youngest children, and allowing that the boy was born immediately before the War, the girl could not be younger than seventy-eight.  She could be older.  She states all facts as through her mother, but she seems to have experienced some of the things she relates.  Her memory is fading.  Failure to get pension or old age assistance oppresses her mind.  She comes back to it again and again.  She carries her card and her commodity order with her in her pocketbook.

She had asked me to write some letters for her when her daughter interfered and said that she didn’t want it done.  She said that she had told the case worker that her husband worked at the Missouri Pacific Shop and that the case worker had asked her if she wouldn’t provide for her mother.  They live in a neat rented house.  The mother weighs about a hundred and ten pounds and is tall.  The daughter is about the same height but weighs about two hundred and fifty.  Time and again, the old lady tried to convey to me a message that she didn’t want her daughter to hear, but I could not make it out.  The daughter was belligerent, as is sometimes the case, and it was only by walking in the very middle of the straight and narrow path that I managed to get my story.

Interviewer:  Samuel S. Taylor
Person interviewed:  Austin Pen Parnell
                    4314 W. Seventeenth Street, Little Rock, Arkansas
Age:  73
Occupation:  Carpenter

Birth and General Fact About Life

“I was born April fifteenth, 1865, the day Lincoln was assassinated, in Carroll County, Mississippi, about ten miles from Grenada.  It’s about half the distance between Grenada and Carrollton.  Carrollton is our county seat but we went to Grenada more than we went to Carrollton.