“Right after freedom, my folks worked on old man Jim Burdyne’s farm.  That is the first place I remember after freedom.  Father taken a little deadening.  You don’t know what a deadening is?  That’s a lease.  He cleaned up some land.  We boys were just gettin’ so we could pick up brush and tops of trees—­and burn it, and one thing and another.  Two years after the War was over, I got big enough to plow.  I was plowing when I was nine years old.  We had three boys and four girls older than me.  The balance of them was born after freedom.  We made crops on shares for three years after freedom, and then we commenced to rent.  Shares were one-third of the cotton and one-fourth of the corn.  They didn’t pay everything they promised.  They taken a lot of it away from us.  They said figures didn’t lie.  You know how that was.  You dassent dispute a man’s word then.  Sometimes a man would get mad and beat up his overseer and run him away.  But my daddy wouldn’t do it.  He said, ’Well, if I owe anything I’ll pay it.  I got a large family to take care of.’

“I never got a chance to go to school any.  There was too much work to do.  I married when I was twenty-one.  I would go off and stay a month or two and come back.  Never left home permanent for a long while.  Stayed ’round home till I was forty years old.  I come to Arkansas in 1898.  I made a living by farming at first.

“I didn’t shoot no craps.  I belong to the church.  I have belonged to the church about forty years or more.  I did play cords and shoot craps and things like that for years before I got religion.

“I come to Little Rock in 1918 and been here ever since.  I worked ’round here in town first one thing and then another.  Worked at the railroad and on like that.

“We used to vote right smart in Mississippi.  Had a little trouble sometimes but it would soon die down.  I haven’t voted since I been here.  Do no good nohow.  Can’t vote in none of these primary elections.  Vote for the President.  And that won’t do no good.  They can throw your ballot out if they want to.

“I believe in the right thing.  I wouldn’t believe in anything else.  I try to be loyal to the state and the city.  But colored folks don’t have much show.  Work for a man four or five years and go back to him and he don’t know nothin’ about you.  They soon forget you and a white man’s word goes far.

“I was able to work as late as 1930, but I ain’t been no ’count since to do much work.  I get a pension for old age from the Welfare and commodities and I depend on that for a living.  Whatever they want to give me, I’ll take it and make out with it.  If there’s any chance for me to git a slave’s pension, I wish they would send it to me.  For I need it awful bad.  They done cut me way down now.  I got heart trouble and high blood pressure but I don’t give up.

“My mother sure used to make good ash cake.  When she made it for my daddy, she would put a piece of paper on it on top and another on the bottom.  That would keep it clean.  She made it extra good.  When he would git through, she would give us the rest.  Sometimes, she wouldn’t put the paper on it because she would be mad.  He would ask, ‘No paper today?’ She would say, ‘No.’  And he wouldn’t say nothin’ more.