“My mama and papa was dark but both was mixed.  They never told me if it was white or Indian.  Papa was a tall, big bony man.  Mama wasn’t so big and stouter.  He never tried to get away from his owners.  He belong to Sam Ritchie five or six miles away.  I never beard much about them.  They had Negro overseers.  Papa was a foreman.  He tanned the cow hides and made shoes for all the hands on Ritchie’s place.  He made our shoes over there too.  They said Stevens and Ritchies didn’t keep bad dogs.  Mistress Eliza Ritchie was a Stevens before she married.  Papa never was sold.  He said they was good to them.  Mama was named Eliza too and papa George Ritchie.

“When freedom was on papa went to Atlanta and got transportation to Chattanooga.  I don’t know why.  He met me and mama.  She picked me up and run away and met him.  We went in a freight box.  It had been a soldier’s home—­great big house.  We et on the first story out of tin pans.  We had white beans or peas, crackers and coffee.  Meat and wheat and cornbread we never smelt at that place.  Somebody ask him how we got there and he showed them a ticket from the Freedmans bureau in Atlanta.  He showed that on the train every now and then.  Upstairs they brought out a stack of wool blankets and started the rows of beds.  Each man took his three as he was numbered.  Every night the same one got his own blankets.  The room was full of beds and white guards with a gun over his shoulder guarded them all night long.  We stayed there a long time—­nearly a year.  They tried to get jobs fast as they could and push em out but it was slow work.  Mama got a place to cook at—­Mrs. Crutchfield’s.  She run a hotel in town but lived in the country.  We stayed there about a year.  Papa was hired somewhere else there.

“Papa got us on a farm in middle Tennessee after that.  We come to Mr. Hooper’s place and share cropped one year, then we went to share crop for Wells Brothers close to Murfreesboro.  I been on the farm all my life since then.

“The Ku Klux never pestered us.  I heard about them.

“The Welfare helps me and I would do work if I could get work I can do.  I could do light work.  Times is hard.  Hard to get a living.  I don’t mind work.  I couldn’t do a day’s work now.

“The young generation is beyond me.  I don’t be about them much.”

Interviewer:  Mrs. Bernice Bowden
Person interviewed:  Alice Rivers
                    W. 17th, Highland Addition, Pine Bluff, Arkansas
Age:  81

“Yes’m, I remember when the Yankees come.  I ricollect when they throwed out all the meat from old master’s smokehouse.  The colored folks was tryin’ to ketch it and I know I tried to ketch it too.

“Don’t I look like I been here in Reb. time?  I was born in Mississippi on Colonel Reed’s place in 1857.

“I just know the Yankees come through.  Had on blue coats with gold lookin’ buttons.  I never will forget it ’cause it was so frightening.