“It has been so long since I heard my parents tell about slavery I couldn’t tell you straight.  She told till she died, talked about how the Yankees done when they come through.  They took axes and busted up good furniture.  They et up and wasted the rations, then humor up the black folks like they was in their favor when they was settin’ out wasting their living.  They done made it to live on.  Some followed them and some stayed on.  They wanted freedom but it wasn’t like they thought it would be.  They didn’t know how it would be.  They didn’t know it meant set out.  Seem like they left.  In some ways times was better and some ways it was worse.  They had to work or starve is what they told me.  That’s the way I found freedom.  ’Course their owners made them work and he looked out for the ration and in slavery.

“I keeps up my own self all I can.  I don’t get help.”

Interviewer:  Mrs. Bernice Bowden
Person interviewed:  Iran Nelson
                    603 E. Fourteenth Ave., Pine Bluff, Ark. 
Age:  77

“Yes ma’m, they fotch me from Mississippi to Arkansas on the steamboat—­you know they didn’t have railroads then.  They fotch my mother and they went back after grandfather and grandmother too.

“Dr. Noell was our master and he had us under mortgage to his brother-in-law.  They fotched us here till he could get straight from that debt, but fore that could be, we got free.

“I knowed slavery times.  I member seem’ em lash some of the rest but you know I wasn’t big enough to put in the fields.  Old mistress say when I got big enough, she goin’ take me for a house girl.  When they fotched mama and grandmother here they had eighty some odd head of niggers.  They was gwine carry em back home after they got that mortgage paid but the war come.

“I member when the Yankees come, my white folks would run and hide and hide us colored folks too.  Boss man had the colored folks get all the meat out of the smokehouse and hide it in the peach orchard in the grass.

“I used to play with old mistress daughter Addie.  We would play in the parlor and after we moved to town some of the little girls would pick up and go home.  You know these town folks didn’t believe in playin’ with the colored folks.

“After mama was free she stayed right there on the place and made a crop.  Raised eight hundred bales and the average was nine.  Mama plowed and hoed too.  I had to work right with her too.

“I never went to school but once.  I learned my ABC’s but couldn’t read.  My next ABC’s was a hoe in my hand.  Mama had a switch right under her belt.  I worked but I couldn’t keep up.  Just seein’ that switch was enough.  I had a pretty good time when I was young, but I had to go all the time.”

Interviewer:  Mrs. Bernice Bowden
Person interviewed:  James Henry Nelson
                    1103 Orange, Pine Bluff, Arkansas
Age:  82
Occupation:  Gardener