“No mam, I didn’t see any fighting, but we could hear the big guns booming away off in the distance.  I was married when I was 21 to Henry Miller and lived with him 51 years and ten months; he died from old age and hard work.  We had two chillun, both girls.  One of them lives here with me in that other room.  Mamma said the Yankees told the Negroes when they got em freed they’d give em a mule and a farm or maybe a part of the plantation they’d been working on for their white folks.  She thought they just told em that to make them dissatisfied and to get more of them ‘to join up with em’ and they were dressed in pretty blue clothes and had nice horses and that made lots of the Negro men go with them.  None of em ever got anything but what their white folks give em, and just lots and lots of em never come back after the war cause the Yankees put them in front where the shooting was and they was killed.  My husband Henry Miller died four years ago.  He followed public work and made plenty of money but he had lots of friends and his money went easy too.  I don’t spect I’ll live long for this hurtin’ in my head is awful bad sometime.”

Interviewer:  Miss Irene Robertson
Person interviewed:  Nathan Miller, Madison, Arkansas
Age:  Born in 1868

“Lady, I’ll tell you what I know but it won’t nigh fill your book.

“I was born in 1862 south of Lockesburg, Arkansas.  My parents was Marther and Burl Miller.

“They told me their owners come here from North Carolina in 1820.  They owned lots of slaves and lots of land.  Mother was medium light—­about my color.  See, I’m mixed.  My hair is white.  I heard mother say she never worked in the field.  Father was a blacksmith on the place.  He wasn’t a slave.  His grandfather willed him free at ten years of age.  It was tried in the Supreme Court.  They set him free.  Said they couldn’t break the dead man’s will.

“My father was a real bright colored man.  It caused some disturbance.  Father went back and forth to Kansas.  They tried to make him leave if he was a free man.  They said I would have to be a slave several years or leave the State.  Freedom settled that for me.

“My great grandmother on my mother’s side belong to Thomas Jefferson.  He was good to her.  She used to tell me stories on her lap.  She come from Virginia to Tennessee.  They all cried to go back to Virginia and their master got mad and sold them.  He was a meaner man.  Her name was Sarah Jefferson.  Mariah was her daughter and Marther was my mother.  They was real dark folks but mother was my color, or a shade darker.

“Grandmother said she picked cotton from the seed all day till her fingers nearly bled.  That was fore gin day.  They said the more hills of tobacco you could cultivate was how much you was worth.

“I don’t remember the Ku Klux.  They was in my little boy days but they never bothered me.

“All my life I been working hard—­steamboat, railroad, farming.  Wore clean out now.