But let me tell you, ma’am.  It’s a lot easier to get behind than it is to catch up.  Falling behind is easy.  Catching up ain’t so simple.  I sort of lost my health and then I had to sell my stock.  After that it was share-crop again.  I share cropped right up until 1935.  That’s when we come here.

Yes, ma’am we moved around a lot.  Longest what I worked for any man was 12 years.  He was J.W.  Hill, the best man I ever did see.  Once I rented from a colored man, but he died.  Was with him 6 years before another man came into possession.  Rented from Cockerill 4 years and Doss 2 years, and Doyle 3 years.  But now I’s like an old shoe.  I’s worn out.  Been a good, faithful servant, but I’s wore out.”

Interviewer:  S.S.  Taylor
Person interviewed:  Rachel Fairley
                    1600 Brown St.
                    Little Rock, Ark. 
Age:  75
Occupation:  General Housework
[Jan 23 1938]

[HW:  Mother Stole to Get Food]

“My mother said she had a hard time getting through.  Had to steal half the time; had to put her head under the pot and pray for freedom.  It was a large pot which she used to cook in on the yard.  She would set it aside when she got through and put it down and put her head under it to pray.

“My father, when nine years old, was put on the speculator’s block and sold at Charlottesville, North Carolina.  My mother was sold on the same day.  They sold her to a man named Paul Barringer, and refugeed her to a place near Sardis, Mississippi, to the cotton country.  Before he was sold, my father belonged to the Greers in Charlottesville.  I don’t know who owned my mother.  I never did hear her say how old she was when she was sold.  They was auctioned off just like you would sell goods.  One would holler one price and another would holler another, and the highest bid would get the slave.

“Mother did not go clear to Sardis but to a plantation ten miles from Sardis.  This was before freedom.  We stayed there till two years after freedom.

“I remember when my mother moved.  I had never seen a wagon before.  I was so uplifted, I had to walk a while and ride a while.  We’d never seen a wagon nor a train neither.  McKeever was the place where she moved from when she moved to Sardis.

“The first year she got free, she started sharecropping on the place.  The next year she moved.  That was the year she moved to Sardis itself.  There she made sharecrops.  That was the third year after freedom.  That is what my father and mother called it, sharecropping.  I don’t know what their share was.  But I guess it was half to them and half to him.

“I do general housework.  I been doing that for eleven years.  I never have any trouble.  Whenever I want to I get off.

“The slaves used to live in one room log huts.  They cooked out in the yard.  I have seen them huts many a time.  They had to cook out in the yard in the summertime.  If they didn’t, they’d burn up.