Interviewer:  Mrs. Bernice Bowden
Person interviewed:  Mandy Thomas, 13th and Pearl Streets,
Pine Bluff, Arkansas
Age:  78
Occupation:  Laundress

“I know my sister told me I was five when my mama was freed.  I was born down below El Dorado.  Andrew Jaggers was my mother’s old master.

“I just remember the soldiers goin’ past.  I think they was Yankees.  They never stopped as I knows of.

“I’ve seed my young missis whip my mother.

“My papa belonged to the Agees.  After I got up good sized, they told me ’bout my papa.  He went with his white folks to Texas and we never did see him after we got up good size.  So mama took a drove of us and went to work for some more white folks.

“I was good and grown when I married and I been workin’ hard ever since.  I was out pickin’ huckleberries tryin’ to get some money to buy baby clothes when my first girl was born.  Yes ma’am.”

Interviewer:  Samuel S. Taylor
Person interviewed:  Omelia Thomas
                    519 W. Ninth Street, Little Rock, Arkansas
Age:  About 70
Occupation:  Making cotton and corn

“I was born in Louisiana—­in Vidalia.  My mother’s name was Emma Grant.  My father’s name was George Grant.  My mother’s name before she married was Emma Woodbridge.  I don’t know the names of my grand folks.  I heard my mother say that my grandmother was named Matilda Woodbridge.  I never got to see her.  That is what I heard my mother say.

“I don’t know the names of my mother’s master, and I don’t know the names of my father’s white folks.

“My father was George Grant.  He served in the War.  I think they said that he was with them when Vicksburg surrendered.  My father has said that he was really named George LaGrande.  But after he enlisted in the War, he went by the name of George Grant.  There was one of the officers by that name, and he took it too.  He was shot in the hip during the War.  When he died, he still was having trouble with that wound.  He was on the Union side.  He was fighting for our freedom.  He wasn’t no Reb.  He’d tell us a many a day, ‘I am part of the cause that you are free.’  I don’t know where he was when he enlisted.  He said he was sold out from Louisville—­him and his brother.

“I never did hear him say that he was whipped or treated bad when he was a slave.  I’ve heard him tell how he had to stand up on dead people to shoot when he was in the War.

“My brother started twice to get my father’s pension, but he never was able to do anything about it.  They made away with the papers somehow and we never did get nothin’.  My father married a second time before he died.  When he died, my stepmother tried to get the pension.  They writ back and asked her if he had any kin, and she answered them and said no.  She hid the papers and wouldn’t let us have ’em—­took and locked ’em up somewheres where we couldn’t find ’em.  She was so mean that if she couldn’t get no pension, she didn’t want nobody else to get none.