“Yes ma’m, I sho did see the Ku Klux and the paddyrollers, too.  They done em bad I tell you.

“I know they was a white man they called Old Man Ford.  He dug a pit just like a barbecue pit, and he would burn coals just like you was goin’ to barbecue.  Then he put sticks across the top and when any of his niggers didn’t do right, he laid em across that pit.  I member they called it Old Ford’s Hell.

“I had a bad time fore freedom and a bad time after freedom till after I married.  I’m doin’ tollably well now.  I lives with my son and his wife and she treats me very well.  I can’t live alone cause I’se subject to inagestin’ and I takes sick right sudden.

“I’m just as thankful as I can be that I’m gettin’ along as well as I is.

“I stayed in the North in Detroit one year.  I liked it very well.  I liked the white people very well.  They was so sociable.  My son lives there and works for Henry Ford.  My oldest son stays in Indiana.

“It was so cold I come back down here.  I’se gettin’ old and I needs to be warm.  Good-bye.”

Interviewer:  Samuel S. Taylor
Person interviewed:  Sarah Pittman
                    1320 W. Twentieth Street, Little Rock, Arkansas
Age:  About 82

“I never saw nothing between white folks and colored folks.  My white folks were good to us.  My daddy’s white folks were named Jordan—­Jim Jordan—­and my mama’s folks were Jim Underwood.  And they were good.  My mama’s and father’s folks both were good to the colored folks.  As the song goes, ‘I can tell it everywhere I go.’  And thank the Lord, I’m here to tell it too.  I raised children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren you see there.  That is my great-grandson playing there.  He is having the time of his life.  I raised him right too.  You see how good he minds me.  He better not do nothin’ different.  He’s about two years old.

“I was born in Union Parish, Louisiana way up yonder in them hills, me and my folks, and they come down here.

“Jim Jordan married one of the Taylor girls—­Jim Taylor’s daughter.  The old folks gave mama to them to do their housework.  My father and mama didn’t belong to the same masters.  He died the first year of the surrender.  He was a wonderful man.  He was a Jackson.  On Saturday night he would stay with us till Sunday.  On Sunday night he would go home.  He would play with us.  Now he and mama both are dead.  They are gone home and I am waiting to go.  They’re waiting for me in the kingdom there.  As the song says, ‘I am waiting on the promises of God.’

“My mama did housework in slave time.  I don’t know what my father did.  In them days you done some working from plantation to plantation.  Them folks is all gone in now near about.  Guess mine will be the next time.

Early Childhood

“First thing I remember is staying at the house.  We et at the white folks’ house.  We would go there in the evening before sundown and git our supper.  One time Jim Underwood made me mad.  Mama said something he didn’t like.  And he tied her thumbs together and tied them to a limb.  Her feet could touch the ground—­they weren’t off the ground.  He said she could stay there till she thought better of it.