“But I don’t know nothin’ ’bout slavery or the War.  I was born and bred in the desert and my mother said it was a long time after freedom ’fore she knowed anything about it.  She said there was just lots of the folks said, to their knowin’, they had been free three years ’fore they knowed anything about it.

“My husband brought me to Arkansas when I was 35 and I been workin’ in the same family, Captain Jeter’s family, ever since-forty odd years.

“I always have worked hard.  I’ve had the flu only reason I’m sittin’ here now.  If I had to sit and hold my hands very long, they’d have to take me to Little Rock.

“I been married twice.  My last husband was Sam Shaw.  He was a great whiskey man and when whiskey went out, he went to bootleggin’ and they got behind him and he left.

“He wrote me once and said if I’d borrow some money on my home and send it to him, he’d come back.  I wrote and told him just like I’m tellin’ you that after I had worked night and day to pay for this house while he was off tellin’ some other woman lies just like he told me, I wasn’t goin’ to send him money.  So I ain’t seen him since.

“I ain’t never been to school much.  When schools got numerous in Mississippi they had me behind a plow handle.

“Mrs. Jeter made me mad once and I quit.  My first husband was a porter on the railroad and I got on the train and went to Memphis with him.

“One time he come back from a trip to Pine Bluff and handed me a little package.  I opened it and it was a note from Mrs. Jeter and a piece of corn bread.  She said, ’Now, Mary, you see what I’ve had to eat.  I want you to come back.’  So I went back and stayed ’til she died.  And now I’m workin’ for her daughter, Mrs. McEwen.  Mrs. Jeter used to say, ’Mary, I know you’re not a Arkansas woman ’cause you ain’t got a lazy bone in your body.’”

Interviewer:  Miss Irene Robertson
Person interviewed:  Violet Shaw, West Memphis, Arkansas
Age:  50

“I heard Grandma Katie Williams say she was put up on a high stump and auctioned off.  She told how great-grandma cried and cried and never seen her no more.  Grandma come from Oakland, Tennessee to Mississippi.  Grandma took the two young children and left the other two with great-grandma.  They took her from her husband.  She never seen none of them again.

“After freedom she didn’t know how to find them.  She never could get trace of them.  She tried.  She never married no more.  I was born at Clarksdale, Mississippi.  I have seen Tom Pernell (white), the young master, come and spend the night with Henry Pernell.  Henry had once been Tom’s father’s slave and carriage driver.  I was too small to know the cause but I remember that several times mighty well.  They fixed him up a clean bed by hisself.  Henry lived in town.  But he might have been drunk.  I never seen no misbehavior out of him.  It was strange to me to see that.