“One old log house there used to be old lady Lucy Goodman’s home.  It has four rooms.  It has a hall running through it.  It was built in slave times.  There is a spring about two hundred yards from it.  That is about ten or twelve feet deep.  There is a big cypress tree trunk hollowed out and sunk down in it to make a curbing.  That cypress is about two or three feet across.  The old man, Henry Goodman, sunk that cypress down in there in slavery time.  He drove an ox team all the time.  That is all the work he done.  She would tell all the overseers, ’Now, don’t you fool with Henry because we ain’t never whipped him ourselves.’

“I don’t know who it is that is living now.  It’s been fifty years ago since I was there.

Right After Freedom

“Right after freedom, when the surrender came, my mother was just a girl ’bout fifteen or sixteen.  She married after freedom.  Her and her husband farmed for a living—­you know, sharecropped.

Ku Klux Klan

“The Ku Klux and the pateroles were the same thing, only the Klan was more up to date.  It’s all set up with a hellish principle.  It’s old Pharaoh exactly.

“The Ku Klux Klan didn’t have no particular effect on the Negro except to scare him.

“When the emancipation came about, the people of the South went to work to see what they could do about it.  The whole South was under martial law.  Some of the people formed the Ku Klux Klan to keep the Negro down.  I never remember that they bothered any of our family or the people in our house.  But they scared some and whipped more, and killed some.

Political Trouble about 1888

“The darkies and the white folks in Union County had an insurrection over the polls about the year 1888.  In them days, when you wanted to put a Republican man in, you didn’t have to do much campaigning.  They just went to the polls and put him in.  Everybody that could vote was Republican.  In the fall of 1888 they had a great trouble down there, and some of them got killed.  They went around and commanded the Negroes not to go to the polls the next day.  Some of the Negroes would tell them, ‘Well, I am going to the polls tomorrow if I have to crawl.’  And then some of them would say, ‘I’d like to know how you goin’ to vote.’  The nigger would ask right back, ‘How you goin’ to vote?’ The white man would say, ‘I’m goin’ to vote as I damn please.’  Then the nigger would say, ‘I’m going to do the same thing.’  That started the trouble.

“On Sunday before the election on Monday, they went around through that county in gangs.  They shot some few of the Negroes.  As the Negroes didn’t have no weapons to protect theirselves, they didn’t have no chance.  In that way, quite a few of the Negroes disbanded their homes and went into different counties and different portions of the state and different states.  Henry Goodman, my grandfather, came into Hot Spring County in this way.