“When we left Ben See’s plantation and went down into Alabama, we left there on a wagon.  Daddy was driving four big steers hitched to it.  There was just three of us children.  The little boy my mother was schooling then, it died.  It died when we went down betwixt New Falls and Montgomery, Alabama.  I don’t know when we left Alabama nor how long we stayed there.  After he was told he was free, I know he didn’t make nare another crop on Ben See’s plantation.

1865-1938

“My father, when he left from where we was freed, he went to hauling logs for a sawmill, and then he farmed.  He done that for years, driving these old oxen.  He mostly did this logging and my mother did the farming.

“I can’t tell you what kind of time it was right after the Civil War because I was too young to notice.  All our lives I had plenty to eat.  When we first came to Arkansas we stopped at old Mary Jones down in Riceville, and then we went down on the Gates Farm at Biscoe.  Then we went from there to Atkins up in Pope County.  No, he went up in the sand hills and bought him a home and then he went up into Atkins.  Of course, I was a married woman by that time.

“I married the second year I came to Arkansas, about sixty-two or sixty-three years ago.  I have lived in Little Rock about thirty-two or thirty-three years.  When I first came here, I came right up here on Seventeenth and State streets.

Voting

“I never voted.  For twenty years the old white lady I stayed with looked after my taxes.  None of my friends ever voted.  I ain’t got nothing but some children and they ain’t never been crazy enough to go to anybody’s polls.

Family

“I have two brothers dead and a sister.  My mother is dead.  I am not sure whether or not my father is dead.  The Ku Klux scared him out of Atkins, and he went up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and I ain’t never heard of him since.  I don’t know whether he is dead or not.

“I have raised five children of my own.

Ku Klux Klan

“These Ku Klux, they had not long ago used to go and whip folks that wasn’t doing right.  That was mongst the white people and the colored.  Comer that used to have this furniture store on Main Street, he used to be the head of it, they say.

“I used to work for an old white man who told me how they done.  They would walk along the street with their disguises hidden under their arms.  Then when they got to the meeting place, they would put their disguises on and go out and do their devilment.  Then when they were through, they would take the disguise off again and go on back about their business, Old man Wolf, he used to tell me about it.

Occupation

“I nursed for every prominent doctor in Little Rock,—­Dr. Judd, Dr. Flynch, Dr. Flynn, Dr. Fly, Dr. Morgan Smith, and a number of others.”