“My mother had a little baby.  The old women would tend to this baby and we would sit and rock the cradle till mother would come.  I know I wasn’t very old, because I didn’t do anything but sit and rock the baby.  I had just gotten big enough to carry the bowls.

“When the Yankees came through they stole Ben See’s horse and brought him out here in Arkansas.  In those days, they used to brand horses.

Some woman out here in Arkansas recognized the horse by his brand and wrote to him about it.  He came out and got the horse.  We had gone by that time.

Visiting the Graves

“Ben See used to take the little darkies to the cemetery and show them where their master and missis was laying.  He never would sell none of his father’s slaves.

The Slave Block

“He would buy other slaves and sell them though.  He used to buy little kids that couldn’t walk.  Maybe some big white man would come that would want to buy a nigger.  He used to have servants in the yard and he would have the slaves he’d bought saved up.  One of the yard servants would catch a little nigger with his head all knotty and filled with twigs.  He would swinge the hair and the little nigger would yell, but he wouldn’t be hurt.

“He had a block built up high just like a meat block out in the yard.  He would have the yard man bring the little niggers out and put them on this block.  I don’t know nothing about their parents, who they were nor where they were.  All I know he would have this child there what he’d done bought.

“If there would be about five or six come in, here’s this nigger sitting up here.  Here’s a lot of folks waitin’ to buy him.  One would say, ’I bid so much.’  Another would say, ‘I bid so much.’  That would go on till the biddin’ got as high as it would go.  Then the little nigger would go to the highest bidder if the bid suited master.

“My mother and father didn’t know their age.  The white folks kept the ages, and that was something they didn’t allow the slaves to handle.  I must have been four or five years old when my mother was in the field, because I wasn’t allowed to take the baby out of the cradle but just to sit and rock it.

Arkansas

“When I come to Arkansas, stages was running from Little Rock down toward Pine Bluff.  Jesse James robbed the Pine Bluff train.  That about the first train came in.  They cut down the trees across the train track.  They had a wooden gun and they went in there and robbed that train with it.  They sent him to the pen and he learned a trade making cigars.

“The Union Station was just like that hillside.  It was just one street in the town.  I don’t know what year nor nothing about it because when I came here it was just like somebody didn’t have any sense.