“The Ku Klux come through the first and second gates to papa’s house and he opened the door.  They grunted around.  They told papa to come out.  He didn’t go and he was ready to hurt them when they come in.  He told them when he finished that crop they could have his room.  He left that year.  They come in on me once before I married.  I was at my girl’s house.  They wanted to be sure we married.  The principal thing they was to see was that you didn’t live in the house wid a woman till you be married.  I wasn’t married but I soon did marry her.  They scared us up some.

“I don’t know if times is so much better for some or not.  Some folks won’t work.  Some do work awful hard.  Young folks I’m speaking ’bout.  Times is mighty fast now.  Seems like they get faster and faster every way.  I’ll be eighty years old this May.  I was born in 1858.”

Interviewer:  Samuel S. Taylor
Person interviewed:  Ellen Cragin
                    815-1/2 Arch Street, Little Rock, Arkansas
Age:  Around 80 or more
[May 31 1939]

[HW:  Escapes on Cow]

“I was born on the tenth of March in some year, I don’t know what one.  I don’t know whether it was in the Civil War or before the Civil War.  I forget it.  I think that I was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi; I’m not sure, but I think it was.

“My mother was a great shouter.  One night before I was born, she was at a meeting, and she said, ‘Well, I’ll have to go in, I feel something.’  She said I was walkin’ about in there.  And when she went in, I was born that same night.

“My mother was a great Christian woman.  She raised us right.  We had to be in at sundown.  If you didn’t bring it in at sundown, she’d whip you,—­whip you within an inch of your life.

“She didn’t work in the field.  She worked at a loom.  She worked so long and so often that once she went to sleep at the loom.  Her master’s boy saw her and told his mother.  His mother told him to take a whip and wear her out.  He took a stick and went out to beat her awake.  He beat my mother till she woke up.  When she woke up, she took a pole out of the loom and beat him nearly to death with it.  He hollered, ’Don’t beat me no more, and I won’t let ’em whip you.’

“She said, ‘I’m goin’ to kill you.  These black titties sucked you, and then you come out here to beat me.’  And when she left him, he wasn’t able to walk.

“And that was the last I seen of her until after freedom.  She went out and got on an old cow that she used to milk—­Dolly, she called it.  She rode away from the plantation, because she knew they would kill her if she stayed.

“My mother was named Luvenia Polk.  She got plumb away and stayed away.  On account of that, I was raised by my mother.  She went to Atchison, Kansas—­rode all through them woods on that cow.  Tore her clothes all off on those bushes.

“Once a man stopped her and she said, ’My folks gone to Kansas and I don’t know how to find ’em.’  He told her just how to go.