“Folks was modester before the children than they are now.  The children was sent to play or git a bucket cool water from the spring.  Everything we said wasn’t smart like what children say now.  We was seen and not heard.  Not seen too much or somebody be stepping ’side to pick up a brush to nettle our legs.  Then we’d run and holler both.

“Now and then a book come about and it was hid.  Better not be caught looking at books.

“Times wasn’t bad ‘ceptin’ them speculator droves and way they got worked too hard and frailed.  Some folks was treated very good, some killed.

“Folks getting mean now.  They living in hopes and lazing about.  They work some.”

Interviewer:  Bernice Bowden
Person Interviewed:  Zenie Cauley
                    1000 Louisiana
                    Pine Bluff, Ark. 
Age:  78
[—­ 7 1938]

“I member when they freed the people.

“I was born in Bedie Kellog’s yard and I know she said, ’Zenie, I hate to give you up, I’d like to keep you.’  But my mother said, ’No, ma’am, I can’t give Zenie up.’

“We still stayed there on the place and I was settled and growed up when I left there.

“I’m old.  I feels my age too.  I may not look old but I feels it.

“Yes ma’am, I member when they carried us to church under bresh arbors.  Old folks had rags on their hair.  Yes’m, I been here.

“My father was a Missionary Baptist preacher and he was a preacher.  Didn’t know ‘A’ from ‘B’ but he was a preacher.  Everbody knowed Jake Alsbrooks.  He preached all over that country of North Carolina.  They’d be as many white folks as colored.  They’d give him money and he never called for a collection in his life.  Why one Sunday they give him sixty-five dollars to help buy a horse.

“Fore I left the old county, I member the boss man, Henry Grady, come by and tell my mother, ’I’m gwine to town now, have my dinner ready when I come back—­kill a chicken.’  She was one of the cooks.  Used to have us chillun pick dewberries and blackberries and bring em to the house.

“Yes, I done left there thirty-six years—­will be this August.

“When we was small, my daddy would make horse collars, cotton baskets and mattresses at night and work in the field in the daytime and preach on Sunday.  He fell down in Bedie Kellog’s lot throwin’ up shucks in the barn.  He was standin’ on the wagon and I guess he lost his balance.  They sent and got the best doctor in the country and he said he broke his nabel string.  They preached his funeral ever year for five years.  Seemed like they just couldn’t give him up.

“White folks told my mother if she wouldn’t marry again and mess up Uncle Jake’s chillun, they’d help her, but she married that man and he beat us so I don’t know how I can remember anything.  He wouldn’t let us go to school.  Had to work and just live like pigs.

“Oh, I used to be a tiger bout work, but I fell on the ice in ’twenty-nine and I ain’t never got over it.  I said I just had a death shock.