“I was born in 1862 in the month of September on the fifteenth.  I was born at a place they call Indian Bay on White River down here in Arkansas.  My mother was named Emmaline Smith and she was born in Tennessee.  I don’t know really now what county or what part of the state.  My father’s name was John Smith.  He was born in North Carolina.  I don’t know nothing about what my grandfather’s name and grandmother’s names were.  I never saw them.  None of my folks are old aged as I am.  My father was sixty years old when he died and my mother was only younger than that.

Experience of Father

“I heard my father say that he helped get out juniper timber in North Carolina.  The white man me and my sister worked with after my father died was the man my father worked with in the juniper swamp.  His name was Alfred Perry White.  As long as he lived, we could do work for him.  We didn’t live on his place but we worked for him by the day.  He is dead now—­died way back yonder in the seventies.  There was the Brooks and Baxter trouble in 1874, and my father died in seventy-five.  White lived a little while longer.

“My father was married twice before he married my mother.  He had two sets of children.  I don’t know how many of them there were.  He had four children by my mother.  He had only four children as far as I can remember.

“I don’t know how my father and my mother met up.  They lived in the same plantation and in the same house.  They were owned by the same man when freedom came.  I don’t know how they got together.  I have often wondered about that.  One from Tennessee and the other from North Carolina, but they got together.  I guess that they must have been born in different places and brought together through being bought and sold.

“My mother was a Murrill.  My father was a Cartwright.  My father’s brother Lewis was a man who didn’t take nothing much from anybody, and he ‘specially didn’t like to take a whipping.  When Lewis’ master wanted to whip him, he would call his mother—­the master’s mother—­and have her whip him, because he figured Uncle Lewis wouldn’t hit a woman.

“I have six children altogether.  Two of them are dead.  There are three girls and one boy living.  The oldest is fifty-seven; the next, fifty; and the youngest, forty-eight.  The youngest is in the hospital for nervous and mental diseases.  She has been there ever since 1927.  The oldest had an arm and four ribs broken in an auto accident last January on the sixteenth of the month.  She didn’t get a penny to pay for her trouble.  I remember the man did give her fifteen cents once.  The truck struck her at the alley there and knocked her clean across the street.  She is fifty-seven years old and bones don’t knit fast on people that old.  She ain’t able to do no work yet.  All of my daughters are out of work.  I don’t know where the boy is.  He is somewheres up North.