“I farmed, cooked, and ironed all my life.  I don’t know how to do nothing else.

“I live with my daughter.  I got a son.”

Interviewer:  Samuel S. Taylor
Person interviewed:  James Henry Stith
                    2223 W. Nineteenth Street
                    Little Rock, Arkansas
Age:  72

“I was born la Sparta in Hancock County, Georgia, in January 26, 1866.  My father was named William Henry Stith, and I was a little tot less than two years old when my mother died.  My father has called her name often but I forget it.  I forget the names of my father’s father, too, and of mother’s people.  That is too far back.

“My father was born in 1818.  He was born in Georgia.  His master was named W.W.  Simpson.  He had a master before Simpson.  Simpson bought him from somebody else.  I never can remember the man’s name.

Houses

“The first houses I saw in Georgia were frame or brick houses.  There weren’t any log houses ’round where I was brought up.  Georgia wasn’t a log house state—­leastwise, not the part I lived in.  In another part there were plenty of sawmills.  That made lumber common.  You could get longleaf pine eighty to ninety feet long if you wanted it.  Some little towns didn’t have no planing mills and you would have to send to Augusta or to Atlanta for the planing work or else they would make planed lumber by hand.  I have worked for four and five weeks at a time dressing lumber—­flooring, ceiling, siding, moldings, and so on.

“My father was still with Simpson when I remembered anything.  At that time the house we lived in was a weatherboarded house just like the ones we live in now.  It was a house that had been built since freedom.  Old man Simpson sent for my father and told him to build a house for himself on the grounds.  My father had been with Simpson for so long and had done so much work for him during slave time that Simpson didn’t want to do without him.  He supplied all the lumber and materials for my father.  During slave time, Simpson had hired my father out to the other planters when he had nothing for him to do in the line of building on his own plantation.  He had had him to superintend his grist mill.  All that was in slavery time.  My father was a highly skilled laborer.  He could do a lot of other things besides building.  So when freedom came, he wanted my father ’round him still.  They both fished and hunted.  He wanted my father to go fishing with him and keep him company.  My father was a carpenter of the first class, you see, even in slave time.  That was all he done.  He was brought up to be a carpenter and did nothing but that all his time.  My daddy was a mighty good mechanic.

Good Master

“My daddy’s master was a very good and kind one.  My father was not under any overseer.  He worked directly under his master.