“The present conditions seems awful unsettled; wages low, prices high and work scarce at times.  Men can get work in the hay two months and bout two months work in the rice or pickin cotton, either one.  Then the work has played clean out till hay time next year.

“How do they live?  Some of their wifes cooks for white people and they eat all they make up soon as they get paid.  Only way they live.”

Interviewer:  Samuel S. Taylor
Person interviewed:  Ervin E. Smith
                    811 Ringo Street, Little Rock, Arkansas
Age:  84

“I have been in this state for forty-nine years.  I will be here fifty years on the fifteenth of December.

“I was born in Ebenezer Township, York County, South Carolina, on the twenty-ninth day of April, in 1854.  That makes me eighty-four years old on Friday.  I was born on Good Friday—­on Good Friday at six o’clock in the morning.

“I am telling you what I was instructed all of my life.  My father, W.D.  Smith, and my mother, Haria, told me these things.  My mother carried a nickname, Salina, all her life, but her real name was Haria.

“I’ll tell you how they happened to keep such good records.  We had a little advantage over the other people of that day.  My father never got any school education, but his brothers instructed him—­his half-brothers.  They were white.  They was good, too.  I mean them brothers thought just as much of me as they did of anybody else.  So my father got pretty good training.  He got it from his brothers and that’s how he learned to keep such good records.

Relatives

“I am told my mother cooked for one family for forty-two years.  Her maiden name was Haria Harris.  She was three-fourths white.  She come from the Indian tribe—­old Catawba Indians.  Her own daddy was a white man, but her Grand daddy on her mother’s side was an Indian.

“I am told that the old fellow bought my mother when she was fifteen years old.  Finally he got hold of both my father and my mother.  Both of them put together didn’t have half colored blood.  He must have loved them a lot to work so hard to get them together.  My father was half white, but his mother was a mulatto woman (Interpreter’s comment—­This should make him a quadroon)[TR:  sentence lined out.]; and my mother’s great-grandmother was a colored woman.

“I never knew much about race troubles.  The best friend I ever had was an old white grandmother.  I was carefully shielded from all unpleasant things.

Fort Sumter

“I was looking at the men when they were getting ready to get on the train to go to Fort Sumter.  Mr. John White, Captain John White, I knew him personally.  He was one of our neighbors.  That was in Ebenezer that he was one of our neighbors.  The soldiers going to capture Fort Sumter caught the Columbia and Augusta train going to Charleston.  Looked like to me there was ten thousand of them.  John White was the captain and Beauregard [HW:  here Gustave Toutant Beauregard.] was the general.