“I was born in Yellowbush County, Mississippi close to Grenada.  Grandmother come from North Carolina.  They wouldn’t sell grandpa.  He was owned by Laston.  They never met again.  She brought two boys with her.  She was a Pernell.  Her master brought her away and would have brought her husband but they wouldn’t sell.  She said durin’ her forty years in slavery she never got a whoopin’.  She was a field hand.  After she come to Mississippi they was so good to her they called her free.  She was a midwife.  She doctored the rich white and colored.  She rode horseback, she said, far and near.  In Grenada after freedom she walked.  They called her free her master was so good to her.  I don’t know how she learned to be a midwife.  Her master was Henry Pernell.  He owned a small place twelve miles from Grenada and another place in the Mississippi bottoms.  My folks become renters after freedom.  I don’t know if they rented from him but I guess they did.

“The Ku Klux never bothered them that I ever heard them mention.”

Interviewer:  Pernella Anderson
Person interviewed:  Frank Fikes, El Dorado, Arkansas
Age:  About 88

“My name is Frank Fikes.  I live between El Dorado and Strong and I am 79 years old if I make no mistake.  I know my mama told me years ago that I was born in watermelon time.  She said she ate the first watermelon that got ripe on the place that year and it made her sick.  She thought she had the colic.  Said she went and ate a piece of calamus root for the pain and after eating the root for the pain behold I was born.  So if I live and nothing happens to me in watermelon time I will be eighty this year.  I was a boy at surrender about the age of fourteen or fifteen.

“My work was very easy when I was a little slave.  Something got wrong with my foot when I first started to walking and I was crippled.  I could not get around like the other children, so my work was to nurse all of the time.  Sometimes, as fast as I got one baby to sleep I would have to nurse another one to sleep.  We belonged to Mars Colonel Williams and he had I guess a hundred families on his place and nearly every family had a baby, so I had a big job after all.  The rest of the children carried water, pine, drove up cows and held the calves off and made fires at old mar’s house.

“I had to keep a heap fire so the boys wouldn’t have to beat fire out of rocks and iron.  Old miss did the cooking while all of the slaves worked.  The slaves stood around the long back porch and ate.  They ate out of wooden bowls and wooden spoons.  They ate greens and peas and bread.  And old miss fed all of us children in a large trough.  She fed us on what we called the licker from the greens and peas with bread mashed in it.  We children did not use spoons.  We picked the bread out with our fingers and got down on our all fours and sipped the licker with our mouth.  We all had a very easy time we thought because we did not know any better then.