Memories of Work on Plantation

“My mother used to milk and I used to rope the calves and hold them so that they couldn’t get to the cow.  I had to keep the horses in the canebrake so they could eat.  That was to keep the soldiers from getting a fine black horse the master had.

Soldiers

“But they got him just the same.  The Yankees used to come in blue uniforms and come right on in without asking anything.  They would take your horse and ask nothing.  They would go into the smokehouse and take out shoulders, hams, and side meat, and they would take all the wine and brandy that was there.

Dances After Freedom

“Two sisters stayed in North Carolina in a two-room house in Wilson County.  There was a big drove of us and we all went to town in the evening to get whiskey.  There was one man who had a wife with us, but all the rest were single.  We cut the pigeon wing, waltzed, and quadrilled.  We danced all night until we burned up all the wood.  Then we went down into the swamp and brought back each one as long a log as he could carry.  We chopped this up and piled it in the room.  Then we went on ’cross the swamp to another plantation and danced there.

“When we got through dancing, I looked at my feet and the bottom of them was plumb naked.  I had just bought new boots, and had danced the bottoms clean out of them.

“I belong to the Primitive Baptist Church.  I stay with Dr. Cope and clean up the back yard for my rent.”

Interviewer:  Mary D. Hudgins. 
Person Interviewed:  Mrs. Lou Fergusson
Aged:  91
Home:  With daughter Mrs. Peach Sinclair, Wade Street.
[Jan 29 1938]

Zig-zaging across better than a mile of increasingly less thickly settled territory went the interviewer.  The terrain was rolling—­to put it mildly.  During most of the walk her feet met the soft resistance of winter-packed earth.  Sidewalks were the exception rather than the rule.

Wade Street, she had been told was “somewhere over in the Boulevard”.  Holding to a general direction she kept her course.  “The Boulevard”, known on the tax books of Hot Springs as Boulevard Addition, sprawls over a wide area.  Houses vary in size and construction with startling frequency.  Few of them are pretentious.  Many appear well planned, are in excellent state of repair and front on yards, scrupulously neat, sometimes patterned with flower beds.  Occasionally a building leans with age, roof caving and windows and doors yawning voids—­long since abandoned by owners to wind and weather.

Up one hill, down another went the interviewer.  Given a proper steer here and there by colored men and women—­even children along the way, she finally found hereself in front of “that green house” belonging to Peach Sinclair.