“Yes’m, I been treated good all my life by white and black.  All of em loved me seemed like.

“I been livin’ in Arkansas all my life.  I never have worked in the field.  I always worked in the house.  I always was a seamstress—­made pants for the men on the place.

“After I come here to Pine Bluff I worked for the white folks.  Used to cook and wash and iron.  Done a lot of work.  I did that.

“I been blind ’leven years but I thank the Lord I been here that long.  Glory to Jesus!  Oh, Lord have mercy!  Glory, glory, glory to Jesus!”

Interviewer:  Miss Irene Robertson
Person interviewed:  Clay Reaves, (light mulatto, large man)
                    Palestine, Arkansas
Age:  80

“I will be eighty years old my next birthday.  It will be July 6th.  Father was bought from Kentucky.  I couldn’t tell you about him.  He stayed on the Reaves place that year, the year of the surrender, and left.  He didn’t live with mother ever again.  I never did hear no reason.  He went on Joe Night’s farm.  He left me and a sister older but there was one dead between us.  Mother raised us.  She stayed on with the Reaves two years after he left.  The last year she was there she hired to them.  The only thing she ever done before freedom was cook and weave.  She had her loom in the kitchen.  It was a great big kitchen built off from the house and a portico joined it to the house.  I used to lay up under her loom.  It was warm there in winter time.  I was the baby.  I heard mother say some things I remember well.

“She said she was never sold.  She said the Reaves said her children need never worry, they would never be sold.  We was Reaves from back yonder.  Mother’s grandfather was a white man.  She was a Reaves and her children are mostly Reaves.  She was light.  Father was about, might be a little darker than I am (mulatto).  At times she worked in the field, but in rush time.  She wove all the clothes on the place.  She worked at the loom and I lay up under there all day long.  Mother had three girls and five boys.

“Mr. Reaves, we called him master, had two boys in the army.  He was a real old man.  He may have had more than two but I know there was two gone off.  The white folks lived in sight of the quarters.  Their house was a big house and painted white.  I’ve been in there.  I never seen no grand parents of mine that I was allowed to claim kin with.

“When I got up some size I was allowed to go see father.  I went over to see him sometimes.  After freedom he went to where his brothers lived.  They wanted him to change his name from Reaves to Cox and he did.  He changed it from James Reaves to James Cox.  But I couldn’t tell you if at one time they belong to Cox in Kentucky or if they belong to Cox in Tennessee or if they took on a name they liked.