“Grandpa was sold away from grandma and three children.  He didn’t want to be sold nary bit.  When they would be talking about selling him he go hide under the house.  They go on off.  He’d come out.  When he was sold he went under there.  He come out and went on off when they found him and told him he was sold to this man.  Grandma said he was obedient.  They never hit him.  He was her best husband.  They never sold grandma and she couldn’t ’count for him being let go.  Grandma had another husband after freedom and two more children.  They left there in a crowd and all come to Arkansas.  Grandma was a cook for the field hands.  She had charge of ringing a big dinner-bell hung up in a tree.  She was black as charcoal.  Mama and grandma said Master Coon and old Mistress Mollie was good to them.  That the reason grandpa would go under the house.  He didn’t want to be sold.  He never was seen no more by them.

“Grandma said sometimes the meals was carried to the fields and they fed the children out of troughs.  They took all the children to the spring set them in a row.  They had a tubful of water and they washed them dried them and put on their clean clothes.  They used homemade lye soap and greased them with tallow and mutton suet.  That made them shine.  They kept them greased so their knees and knuckles would ruff up and bleed.

“Grandma and mama stopped at Fourche Dam.  They was so glad to be free and go about.  Then it scared them to hear talk of being sold.  It divided them and some owners was mean.

“In my time if I done wrong most any grown person whoop me.  Then mama find it out, she give me another one.  I got a double whooping.

“Times is powerful bad to raise up a family.  Drinking and gambling, and it takes too much to feed a family now.  Times is so much harder that way then when I was growing.”

Interviewer:  Miss Sallie C. Miller
Person interviewed:  Ann May, Clarksville, Arkansas
Age:  82

“I was born at Cabin Creek (Lamar now, but I still call it Cabin Creek.  I can’t call it anything else).  I was sold with my mother when I was a little girl and lived with our white folks until after the war and was freed.  We lived on a farm.  My father belong to another family, a neighbor of ours.  We all lived with the white folks.  My mother took care of all of them.  They was always as good as they could be to us and after the war we stayed on with the white folks who owned my father and worked on the farm for him.  His master gave us half of everything we made until we could get started our selves, then our white folks told my father to homestead a place near him, and he did.  We lived there until after father died.  We paid taxes and lived just like the white folks.  We did what the white folks told us to do and never lost a thing by doing it.  After I married my husband worked at the mill for your father and made a living for me and I worked for the white folks.  Now I am too old to cook but I have a few washin’s for the white folks and am getting my old age pension that helps me a lot.