“Once somebody stole an automatic shotgun.  They stole a colt one time.  They stole all my clothes and pawned them to a whiskey dealer.  He got sent to the pen for selling whiskey, but I didn’t get my clothes.  They come in the yard and steal my potatoes, collards, turnips, ochre (okra?), and so on.  I lay there in the bed and see them, but I can’t stop them.  All I can do is to holler, ’You better go on and let them things alone.’  Ever since the last war, I haven’t been able to work.  I am bare-feeted and naked now on account of not bein’ able to support myself.

“I just come out of the hospital.  I been too sick even to work in my garden.  After I come home I taken a backset[TR:  ?] but I am still staying here.  I am just here on the mercies of the people.  I don’t get nothing but what the people give me.  I don’t get no moddities nor nothin’ from the Government.

“I ain’t never been able to get no help from the Government.  Long time ago, I went down to the place and asked for help and they told me that since I was alone, I oughta be able to help myself.  They gimme a ticket for twenty meals and told me by the time I ate them up, they might have something else they could do for me.  I told them I couldn’t go back and forth to git the meals.  I have the ticket now.  I couldn’t git to the place to use it none, so I keep it for a keepsake.  It is ’round here somewheres or other.  I was past the pension age.  I ain’t been able to do no steady work since the war.  I was too old for the war—­the World War.”

Interviewer’s Comment [HW:  omit]

The spelling of the name Sunnaville is phonetic.  I don’t recognize the name and he couldn’t spell it of course.

When I called, he had potatoes that weighed at least seven pounds.  They were laid out on the porch for sale.  He had a small patch in his yard which he cultivated, and had gotten about ten bushels from it.

His account of slavery times is so vivid that you would consider his age nearer eighty than sixty-eight.  A little questioning reveals that he has no idea of his age although he readily gives it as sixty-eight—­a memorized figure.

Interviewer:  Miss Irene Robertson
Person Interviewed:  Lula Taylor, R.F.D., east of town,
                    Brinkley, Arkansas
Age:  71

“My mother was sold five times.  She was sold when she was too little to remember her mother.  Her mother was Charity Linnerman.  They favored.  She was dark and granny was light colored.  My mother didn’t love her mother like I loved her.

“Granny lived in a house behind the white church (?) in Helena.  After freedom we kept writing till we got in tetch with her.  We finally got granny with us on the Jefferies place at Clarendon.