“After the war ended we stayed on the place one year and made a crop and then my father bought fifty acres of Mr. Ben Martin.  He paid some on it every year and when it was paid for Mr. Ben give him a deed to it.

“I’m the only child my mother had.  She never had but me, one.  I went to school after the war and I member at night I’d be studyin’ my lesson and rootin’ potatoes and papa would tell us stories about the war.  I used to love to hear him on long winter evenings.

“I stayed right there till I married.  My father had cows and he’d kill hogs and had a peach orchard, so we got along fine.  Our white folks was always good to us.”

Interviewer:  Thomas Elmore Lucy
Person interviewed:  Lucy Cotton
                    Russellville, Arkansas
Age:  72
[Jan 7 1938]

“Lucy Cotton’s my name, and I was born on the tenth day of June, 1865, jist two months after the surrender.  No suh, I ain’t no kin to the other Cottons around here, so far as I knows.  My mother was Jane Hays, and she was owned by a master named Wilson.

“I’ve belonged to the Holiness Church six years. (They call us ‘Holiness,’ but the real name is Pentecostal.)

“Yes suh, there’s a heap of difference in folks now ’an when I was a girl—­especially among the young people.  I think no woman, white or black, has got any business wastin’ time around the votin’ polls.  Their place is at home raisin’ a family.  I hear em sometimes slinging out their ‘damns’ and it sure don’t soun’ right to me.

“Good day, mistah.  I wish you well—­but the gov’ment ain’t gonna do nothing.  It never has yit.”

Interviewer:  Miss Irene Robertson
Person interviewed:  T.W.  Cotton, Helena, Arkansas
Age:  80
[May 11 1938]

“I was born close to Indian Bay.  I belong to Ed Cotton.  Mother was sold from John Mason between Petersburg and Richmond, Virginia.  Three sisters was sold and they give grandma and my sister in the trade.  Grandma was so old she wasn’t much account fer field work.  Mother left a son she never seen ag’in.  Aunt Adeline’s boy come too.  They was put on a block but I can’t recollect where it was.  If mother had a husband she never said nothing ’bout him.  He muster been dead.

“Now my papa come from La Grange, Tennessee.  Master Bowers sold him to Ed Cotton.  He was sold three times.  He had one scar on his shoulder.  The patrollers hit him as he went over the fence down at Indian Bay.  He was a Guinea man.  He was heavy set, not very tall.  Generally he carried the lead row in the field.  He was a good worker.  They had to be quiet wid him to get him to work.  He would run to the woods.  He was a fast runner.  He lived to be about a hundred years old.  I took keer of him the last five years of his life.  Mother was seventy-one years old when she died.  She was the mother of twenty-one children.

“Sure, I do remember freedom.  After the Civil War ended, Ed Cotton walked out and told papa:  ‘Rob, you are free.’  We worked on till 1866 and we moved to Joe Lambert’s place.  He had a brother named Tom Lambert.  Father never got no land at freedom.  He got to own 160 acres, a house on it, and some stock.  We all worked and helped him to make it.  He was a hard worker and a fast hand.