“I have pretty fair health for an old woman like I am.  I am bothered with the rheumatism.  The Lawd wouldn’t let both of us git down at the same time. (Here she refers to her husband who was sick in bed at the time she made the statement.  You have his story already.  It was difficult for her to tell her story, for he wanted it to be like his—­ed.)

“I belong to the Primitive Baptist Church.  I haven’t changed my membership from my home.

“I got married in 1882, in February.  How many years is that?  I got so I can’t count up nothin’.  Fifty-six years.  Yes, that’s it; that’s how long I been married.  I had a little sister that got married with me.  She didn’t really git married; she just stood up with me.  She was just a little baby girl.  They told me I was pretty near twenty-three years old when I married.  I have a daughter that’s been married twenty-five years.  We had older daughters, but that one was the first one married.  I have got a daughter over in North Little Rock that is about fifty years old.  Her husband is dead.  We had ten children.  My daughter is the mother of ten children too.  She got married younger than I did.  This girl I am living with is my baby.  I have four children living—­three girls and one boy.  A woman asked me how many children I had and I told her three.  She was a fortuneteller and she wanted to tell me my fortune.  But I didn’t want her to tell me nothin’.  God was gittin’ ready to tell me somethin’ I didn’t want to hear.  I’ve got five great-grandchildren.  We don’t have no great-great-grandchildren.  Don’t want none.”

Interviewer’s Comment

The old lady’s style was kind of cramped by the presence of her husband.  Every once in a while, when she would be about to paint something in lurid colors, he would drop in a word and she would roll her phrases around in her mouth, so to speak, and shift and go ahead in a different direction and on another gear.

Very pleasant couple though—­with none of the bitterness that old age brings sometimes.  The daughter’s name is Searles.

Interviewer:  Samuel S. Taylor
Person Interviewed:  Thomas Ruffin
                    1310 Cross Street, Little Rock, Arkansas
Age:  82 or 84

“I was born in North Carolina, Franklin County, near Raleigh.  My father’s name really I don’t know.  Folks said my master was my daddy.  That’s what they told me.  Of course, I don’t know myself.  But then white folks did anything they wanted to in slavery times.

“My mother’s name was Morina Ruffin.  I don’t know the names of my grandparents.  That is too far back in slavery for me.  Of course, old man Ruffin my father’s father, which would have been my grandfather, he died way back yonder in slave times before the war.  My father gotten kilt in the war.  His name was Tom Ruffin.  I was named after him.  He died trying to hold us.  That man owned three hundred slaves.  He never married.  Carried my mother round everywhere he went.  Out of all his niggers, he didn’t have but one with him.  That was in slavery time and he was a fool about her.