I been farming and preaching.  I started preaching in Mississippi.  I joined the conference in Arkansas in 1886 and started preaching at Surrounded Hill (Biscoe).  I come here in 1884 from Pinola County.  Mississippi.  I had some stock and they was fencing up everything over there.  I had no land so I come to an open country.  It wasn’t long before they fenced it in.  I come to Brinkley and worked for Gun and Black sawmill and I been here forty or fifty years.  I don’t know jess how long.  I couldn’t starve to death in a whole year here.  The people wouldn’t let me.  I got lot of friends, both black and white, here.

I married December 17, 1874 in the Baptist church.  Glasco Wilson was the preacher married me.  My wife died here in dis house nine years ago.  We had ten children but jes two livin now.  My girl married a preacher and live at Hope.  Arkansas.  My son preaches in Parson, Kansas.

I supports my own self.  I works and I preaches a little yet.  I saved up some money but it nearly give out.  The young generation, some of them, do mighty bad.  Some of them is all right.  Some of them don’t do much and don’t save nothing.  I owns this house and did own another one what burned down.  A lamp exploded and caught it while I was going off up the road but I never looked back or I would have seen it.  It seem lack now it takes more money to do than it ever did in times before.  Seems like money is the only thing to have and get.  Folks gone scottch crazy over money, money!  Both is changing.  The white folks, I’m speaking bout, the white folks has changed and course the colored folks keeping up wid them.  The old white and colored neither can’t keep up wid the fast times.  I say it’s the folks that made this depression and it’s the folks keeping the depression.  The little fellow is squeezed clear out.  It out to be stopped.  Folks ain’t happy like they used to be.  Course they sung songs all the time.  Religious choruses mostly.

Interviewer:  Samuel S. Taylor
Person interviewed:  Amanda Rosa
                    817 Schiller Street, Little Rock, Arkansas
Age:  82

“I was nine years old in the time of the surrender.  I know I was here in that time.  I don’t know nothin’ ’bout their carryin’-on.  I know they whipped them with hobble rods.  You don’t know what hobble rods is!!!  Ain’t you seen these here long thin hick’ry shoots?  They called hobble rods.  I don’t know why they called ’em hobble rods.  I know they made you hobble.  They’d put ’em in the fire and roast ’em and twist ’em.  I have seen ’em whip them till the blood run down their backs.  I’ve seen ’em tie the women up, strip ’em naked to their waist and whip ’am till the blood run down their backs.  They had a nigger whipper, too.

“I was born in Salem, Alabama.  I came up here about twenty-five years ago.

“Isaac Adair was the name of the old man who owned me.  He owned my mother and father too, Hester and Scip.  Their last name was Adair, the same as their master’s.