“I don’t know just when I was born, nor how old I am.  When I come to remember anything, I was free.  But I don’t know how old I am, nor when it was.

“I heard my father speak of pateroles.  Just said that they’d ketch you.  He used to scare us by telling us that the pateroles would ketch us.  We thought that was something dreadful.

“I never heard nothin’ about jayhawkers.  I heard something about Ku Klux but I don’t know what it was.

“My father married my mother just after the War.

“I been married twice.  My first husband got killed on the levee.  And the second is down in the country somewheres.  We are separated.

“I don’t get no help from the Welfare, wish I did.  I ain’t had no money to get to the doctor with my eyes.”

Interviewer’s Comments

The old lady sat with her eyes nearly closed while I questioned her and listened to her story.  Those eyes ran and looked as though they needed attention badly.  The interview was conducted entirely on the porch as that of Annie Parks.  Traffic interrupted; friends interrupted; and a daughter interrupted from time to time.  But this daughter, while a little suspicious, was in no degree hostile.  The two of them referred me to J.T.  Tims, who, they said, knew a lot about slavery.  His story is given along with this one.

I got the impression that the old lady was born before the War, but I accepted her statement and put her down as born since the War and guessed her age as near seventy.  She was evidently quite reserved about some details.  Her father’s marriage to her mother after the War would not necessarily mean that he was not married to her slave fashion before the War.  She didn’t care so much about giving any story, but she was polite and obliging after she had satisfied herself as to my identity and work.

Interviewer:  Samuel S. Taylor
Person interviewed:  Omelia Thomas
                    1014 W. Fifth Street, Little Rock, Arkansas
Age:  63

“I was born in Marianna, Lee County, in Arkansas.  I wasn’t born right in the town but out a piece from the town in the old Bouden place, in 1875.  My father kept a record of all births and deaths in his Bible.  He never forgot whenever a new baby would come to get down his glasses and pen and ink and Bible.  My daddy learned to read and write after the emancipation.

“My father’s name was Frank Johnson and my mother’s name was Henrietta Johnson.  I don’t know the given names of my father’s and mother’s parents.  I do know my mother’s mother’s name.  Lucinda, and my father’s mother was named Stephens.  I don’t know their given names.  My mother’s master was a Trotter.

“My father was a free man.  He hired his own time.  He told me that his father hired his own time and he would go off and work.  He made washpots.  He would go off and work and bring back money and things.  His mother was free too.  When war was declared, he volunteered to go.  He was with the Yankees.  My father worked just like my grandfather did.  Whenever he had a job to do.  He never had a lick from anybody, carried his gun strapped down on his side all the time and never went without it.