“Grandma was sold in South Carolina to Mississippi and sold again to Dr. Shelton.  Now that was my father’s father and mother.  She said they rode and walked all the way.  They came on ox wagons.  She said on the way they passed some children.  They was playing.  A little white boy was up in a persimmon tree settin’ on a limb eating persimmons.  He was so pretty and clean.  Grandma says, ’You think you is some pumpkin, don’t you, honey child.’  He says, ’Some pumpkin and some ‘simmon too.’  Grandma was a house girl.  She got to keep her baby and brought him.  He was my father.  Uncle was born later.  Then they was freed.  Grandma lived to be ninety-five years old.  Mrs. Dolphy Wooly and Mrs. Shelton was her young mistresses.  They kept her till she died.  They kept her well.

“Grandma told us about freedom.  She was hired out to the Browns to make sausage and dry out lard.  Five girls was in the field burning brush.  They was white girls—­Mrs. Brown’s girls.  They come to the house and said some Blue Coats come by and said, ‘You free.’  They told them back, ‘That’s no news, we was born free.’  Grandma said that night she melted pewter and made dots on her best dress.  It was shiny.  She wore it home next day ’cause she was free, and she never left from about her own white folks till she died and left them.

“Times seem very good on black folks till hard cold winter and spring come, then times is mighty, mighty bad.  It is so hard to keep warm fires and enough to eat.  Times have been good.  Black folks in the young generation need more heart training and less book learning.  Times is so fast the young set is too greedy.  They is wasteful too.  Some is hard workers and tries to live right.

“I wash and irons and keep a woman’s little chile so she can work.  I owns my home.”

Interviewer:  Mrs. Irene Robertson
Person Interviewed:  Ike McCoy, Biscoe, Arkansas
Age:  65
[TR:  Illegible words indicated by “——­“,
     questionable words followed by “?".]

“My parents named Harriett and Isaac McCoy.  Far as I knew they was natives of North Kaline (Carolina).  He was a farmer.  He raised corn and cabbage, a little corn and wheat.  He had tasks at night in winter I heard him say.  She muster just done anything.  She knit for us here in the last few years.  She died several years ago.  Now my oldest sister was born in slavery.  I was next but I came way after slavery.

“In war time McCoys hid their horses in the woods.  The Yankees found them and took all the best ones and left their [——­] (nags).  Old boss man McCoy hid in the closet and locked himself up.  The Yankees found him, broke in on him and took him out and they nearly killed him beating him so bad.  He told all of ’em on the place he was going off.  They wore him out.  He didn’t live long after that.