“I never had any experiences with the Yankees.  My mother used to tell how they took all the old master’s stuff—­mules and sugar—­and then throwed it out and rode their horses through it when they didn’t want it for theirselves.

“I married a second time.  I have been single now for the last three years.  My husband died on the twentieth of August three years ago.  I ain’t got no business here at all.  I ought to be at my home living well.  But I work for what I get and I’m proud of it.

“A working woman has many things to contend with.  That girl downstairs keeps a gang of men coming and going, and sometimes some of them sometimes try to come up here.  Sunday night when I come home from church, one was standing in the dark by my door waiting for me.  I had this stick in my hand and I ordered him down.  He saw I meant business; so he went on down.  Some of them are determined.

“There’s no hope for tomorrow so far as these young folks are concerned.  And the majority of the old people are almost worse than the young ones.  Used to be that all the old people were mothers and fathers but now they are all going together.  Everything is in a critical condition.  There is not much truth in the land.  All human affection is gone.  There is mighty little respect.  The way some people carry on is pitiful.”

Interviewer’s Comment

The men who bother Omelia Thomas probably take her for a young woman.  She hasn’t a gray hair in her head, and her skin is smooth and must be well kept.  She looks at least twenty-five years younger than she is, and but for the accident of her presence at another interview, I would never have dreamed that she had a story to tell.

I went to see her in the quarters where she lives—­over the garage in the back yard of the white people she works for.  When I got halfway up the stairs, she shouted, “You can’t come up here.”  I paused in perplexity for a moment, and she stuck her head out the door and looked.  Then she said, “Oh, I beg pardon; I thought you were one of those men that visit downstairs.”  I had noticed the young lady below as I entered.  She is evidently a hot number, and as troublesome as a sore thumb to the good old lady above her.

Interviewer:  Mrs. Bernice Bowden
Person interviewed:  Tanner Thomas
                    1213 Louisiana, Pine Bluff, Arkansas
Age:  78

“I was born down here at Rob Roy on the river on the Emory place.  My mother’s name was Dinah Thomas and my father’s name was Greene Thomas.  He taken sick and died in the War on the North side.  That’s what my mother told me.  I was born under Mars Jordan Emory’s administration.

“I ’member somebody brought me here to Pine Bluff to Lawyer Bell’s house.  I stayed two or three months, then Mars Jordan sent for me and carried me back out to Rob Roy and I stayed with my mother.  She had done married again but I stayed with her all the time till I got grown and I married.