“Pa made us go clean.  He made me comb and wrop my hair every night.  I had prutty hair then.  I had tetter and it all come out.  I has to wear this old wig now.  When I was young my eye-sight got bad, they said measles settled in em and to help em Ma had these holes put in em (in her ears).  I been wearin’ earbobs purt nigh all my life.

“The Ku Klux never bothered us.  They never come nigh our house no time.  Pa died and Ma married a old man.  They stayed in the same place a while.  When Pa died he had cattle and stock that why I don’t know if he got somepin at Freedom.  He had plenty.

“We lived at Holly Springs (Miss.) when they started the first colored schools.  There was three lady teachers.  I think a man.  One of the white teachers boarded at my Ma’s.  On Saturday the other two eat there.  I recollect Ma cooking and fixing a big dinner Saturday.  No white folks let em stay with em or speak to em.  They was sent from up north to teach the darky chaps.  I was one went to school.  They wasn’t nice like my white folks then neither.  They paid high board and white folks sent em to Ma so she get the money.  I was 14 years old when I married.  I lived wid my husband more an 50 years.  We got long what I’ze tellin’ you.  This young set ain’t got no raisin’ reason they cain’t stand one nother.  I don’t let em come in my yard.  I cain’t raise no children, I’m too old and they ain’t got no manners and the big ones got no sense.  Jes wild.  They way they do.  They live together a while and quit.  Both them soon livin’ wid somebody else.  That what churches fer, to marry in.  Heap of em ain’t doin’ it.  No children don’t come here tearin’ up what I work and have.  I don’t let em come in that gate, I have to work so hard in my old days.  I picked cotton.  I can, by pickin’ hard, make a dollar a day.  I cooked ten years fore I stopped, I cain’t hold up at it.  I washed and ironed till the washing machines ruined that work fer all of us black folks.  Silk finery and washin’ machines ruint the black folks.

“Ma named Elsie Langston and Lewis Langston.  They took that name somehow after the old war (Civil War), I recken it was her old master’s name.

“After I was married and had children I was hard up.  I went to a widow woman had a farm but no men folks.  She say, ’If you live here and leave your little children in my yard and take my big boys and learn em to work, I will cook.  On Saturday you wash and iron.’  She took me in that way when my color wouldn’t help me.  I stayed there—­between Memphis and Holly Springs.

“I live hard the way I live.  I pick cotton when I can’t go hardly.  They did give me a little commodity but I lose half day work if I go up there and wait round.  Don’t know what they give me.  I don’t get a cent of the penshun.”

Interviewer:  Miss Irene Robertson
Person interviewed:  Wade Thermon,
                    R.F.D. (PWA Reservation), Des Arc, Arkansas
Age:  67