“Grandpa was part Indian.  Dr. Jimmy didn’t whoop.  He visited and he’d get a jug of whiskey, call his niggers and give them a little, make them feel good and get them in a humor for working.  Dr. Jimmy had a nigger overseer.  They was digging a ditch and making a turnpike from Dr. Manson’s place to Murfreesboro.  They told grandpa to drive down in the ditch with his load of rock and let the white folks drive up on the dump.  They was hauling and placing rock on the dump to make a turnpike.  In Tennessee it was a law if a man owned a nigger he had to whoop him or have him whooped.  If he didn’t he had to sell him.  They told grandpa if he didn’t do as they said they would whoop him, then they said they would break his back.  They took the fussing to Dr. Jimmy for him to whoop grandpa.  He sold him to nigger traders and they drove him to Mississippi.  Mother never seen him no more.  Grandma died of grief.  She had nine girls and no boys.  After freedom seven went North and mama, was Jane, and Aunt Betty lived on in Tennessee, and I lived some in Mississippi.  That’s the reason I hate Mississippi to this very day.

“The day they fit on Stone River in Tennessee, brother Hood was born.  He was born during the battle.  I guess they moved off of Dr. Jimmy’s place at freedom, for I was born on Jack Little’s place.

“The times is passing faster than I want it to and I’m doing very well.  I don’t never meddle in young folks’ business and I don’t ’low them meddling in mine.  Folks is the ones making times so hard.  Some making times hard for all rest of us can’t help ourselves.  It is sin and selfishness makes times so hard.  Young folks no worse than some not so very old.  It ain’t young folks making times hard.  It’s older ones so greedy.  They don’t have no happiness and don’t want to see old ones live nor the young ones neither.”

Interviewer:  Samuel S. Taylor
Person interviewed:  Warren Taylor
                    3200 W. Seventeenth Street, Little Rock, Arkansas
Age:  74

My people are all from Richmond, Virginia.  I was just four years old when they come here.  My father was in charge of all the machinery.  He ran the gin.  Didn’t do anything else.  My mother was a house girl.  The kids learned her everything they learned in school.  She knew everything.  My father died when I was young.  My mother lived till she was eighty.  But the time she was fifty, I bought her a home and sat her down on Pulaski Street in that home.  And that is why I have so little trouble.

“My ma belonged to Hoffman.  He sold her to Wiley Adams.  He carried her to Mississippi.  She stayed there for a short time and then came to Arkansas.  He settled in a little place called Tulip, Arkansas.  Then freedom came and we came to Little Rock and settled at what is now Seventh and Ringo Streets; but then it was just a stage road leading to Benton, Arkadelphia, and other places.  Stages passed twice a day with passengers and freight.  No railroads at all then.  The government kept the roads up.  They had the arsenal hall where the city park is and had a regiment of soldiers there.  The work on that road was kept up by the soldiers.  That was under Grant’s administration.  I never saw but three presidents—­three Democratic presidents—­Cleveland, Wilson, and Roosevelt.