Another teacher entered the room.  No, she couldn’t remember the name.  But the old man often came up to watch the children at play.  He said it made him happy to see them getting opportunities he never could have had.  Wait a minute—­he might be outside at this very moment.  A clatter of heels and calls of triumph.  “Yes!  Yes!  Here he is!”

Outside I dashed to drop flat on the sidewalk[HW:?] beside the aged man I had passed a few minutes before.  Out came my smile and a notebook.  With only a few preliminaries and amenities the interview was in full swing.  It neither startled nor confused him, to have an excited young woman plant herself on a public sidewalk at his side and demand his life’s story.  A man who had belonged to three different masters before the age of 15 was inured to minor surprises.  Tom Robinson long since learned to take life as it came.

He is quite deaf in one ear and hears poorly with the other.  Nobody within a quarter of a block could have been in doubt of what was going on.  A youth moved closer.  The kept-after-school pair emerged from the building and stood near us, goggle-eyed thruout the interview.  When we were finished, Robinson turned to the children and gave them, a grandfatherly lecture about taking advantage of their opportunities, a lecture in which the white woman sitting beside him joined heartily—­drawing liberally on comments of ex-slaves in recent interviews concerning the helplessness felt in not being able to write and read letters from well loved friends.

“Where was I born, ma’am?  Why it’s my understanding that it was Catawba County, North Carolina.  As far as I remember, Newton was the nearest town.  I was born on a place belonging to Jacob Sigmens.  I can just barely remember my mother.  I was not 11 when they sold me away from her.  I can just barely remember her.

“But I do remember how she used to take us children and kneel down in front of the fireplace and pray.  She’d pray that the time would come when everybody could worship the Lord under their own vine and fig tree—­all of them free.  It’s come to me lots of times since.  There she was a’praying, and on other plantations women was a’praying.  All over the country the same prayer was being prayed.  Guess the Lord done heard the prayer and answered it.

“Old man Sigmens wasn’t a bad master.  Don’t remember so much about him.  I couldn’t have been 11 when he sold me to Pickney Setzer.  He kept me for a little while and then he sold me to David Robinson.  All three of them lived not so far apart in North Carolina.  But pretty soon after he bought me old men Dave Robinson moved to Texas.  We was there when the war started.  We stayed there all during the war.  I was set free there.

“We lived in Cass County.  It was pretty close to the Arkansas border, and ’twasn’t far from Oklahoma—­as is now.  I remember well when they was first gathering them up for the war.  We used to hear the cannon often.  Was I afraid?  To be sure I was scared, right at first.  Pretty soon we got used to it.  Somebody even made up a song, ’Listen to the Home-made Thunder’.  They’d sing it every time the cannon started roaring.