“Lucius Grimm was old master.  He’s been dead a long time.  His wife died ’bout two years after the Civil War and he died twenty-five years after.

“I ‘member durin’ of the war he buried his stuff—–­silverware and stuff—­and he never took it up.  And after he died his brother’s son lived in California, and he come back and dug it up.

“The Yankees burned up four hundred bales of cotton and taken the meat and two cribs of corn.

“I heard ’em talk ’bout the Ku Klux but I never did see ’em.

“My mother said old Mars Lucius was good to his folks.  She said he first bought her and then she worried so ’bout my father, he paid twenty-five hundred dollars for him.

“Biggest part of my life I farmed, and then I done carpenter work.

“I been blind four years.  The doctor says it’s cataracts.

“I think the younger generation goin’ to cause another war.  They ain’t studyin’ nothin’ but pleasure.”

Interviewer:  S.S.  Taylor
Person interviewed:  Mary Estes Peters,
                    3115 W. 17th Street, Little Rock, Arkansas
Age:  78

Biographical

Mary Estes Peters was born a slave January 30, 1860 in Missouri somewhere.  Her mother was colored and her father white, the white parentage being very evident in her color and features and hair.  She is very reticent about the facts of her birth.  The subject had to be approached from many angles and in many ways and by two different persons before that part of the story could be gotten.

Although she was born in Missouri, she was “refugeed” first to Mississippi and then here, Arkansas.  She is convinced that her mother was sold at least twice after freedom,—­once into Mississippi, one into Helena, and probably once more after reaching Arkansas, Mary herself being still a very small child.

I think she is mistaken on this point.  I did not debate with her but I cross-examined her carefully and it appears to me that there was probably in her mother’s mind a confused knowledge of the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862.  Lincoln’s Compensation Emancipation plan advocated in March 1863, the Abolition in the District of Columbia in 1862 in April, the announcement of Lincoln’s Emancipation intention in July 1862, the prohibition of slavery in present and future territories, June 19, 1862, together with the actual issuance of the Emancipation in September 1862, and the effectiveness of the proclamation in January 1, 1863, would well give rise to an impression among many slaves that emancipation had been completed.