“I have been married fifty-seven years.  I married in 1881.  My wife was a Lemons.  I married on February tenth in Tennessee at Stanton.  Nancy Lemons.

“I went to public school a little after the war.  My wife and I both went to Haywood after we were married.  After we married and had children, we went.  I took a four-years’ course there when it was a fine institution.  It’s gone down now.

“I was the oldest boy.  We had two mules.  We farmed on the halves.  We made fifteen bales of cotton a year.  Never did make less than ten or twelve.

“I have been in the ministry fifty-three years.  I was transferred to Arkansas in 1883 in the conference which met at Humboldt.  My first work here was in Searcy in 1884.

“I think the question of Negro suffrage will work itself out.  As we get further away from the Civil War and the reconstruction, it will be less and less opposition to the Negro’s voting.  You can see a lot of signs of that now.

“I don’t know about the young people.  They are gone wild.  I don’t know what to say about them.

“I think where men are able to work I think it is best to give them work.  A man that is able to work ought to be given work by the government if he can’t get it any other way.”

Interviewer:  Mrs. Bernice Bowden
Person interviewed:  Lyttleton Dandridge
                    2800 W. Tenth Street, Pine Bluff, Arkansas
Age:  80

“I was told I was born in ’57 in East Carroll Parish, Louisiana.

“Oh, I can remember before the War broke out.  Yes ma’am, I had good owners.  Old master and mistress was named James Railey and Matilda Railey.  I called her mistress.

“I remember one time my father carried me to Natchez on Christmas to spend with his people.  His parents were servants on a plantation near Natchez.

“I remember two shows I saw.  They was the Daniel Rice shows.  They was animal shows but they had em on a boat, kind of a flatboat.  We didn’t have trains and things like that—­traveled on the big waters.

“I remember when we refugeed to Texas in ’63.  They raised tobacco there.

“We got free in ’65 and the Governor or somebody ordered all the owners to take all the folks back that wanted to go.

“All the young folks, they had them in Tyler, Texas makin’ bullets.  My father had the care of about fifty youngsters makin’ bullets.

“Old master had two plantations in Louisiana and three in Mississippi.  He was a large slaveholder.

“When we got back to Louisiana from Texas, ever’thing was the same except where the levees had been cut and overflowed the land.

“Old master died before the War broke out and my mistress died in ’67.

“My father died in Texas.  That left my mother a widow.  She spent about two weeks at the old home place in Louisiana.  She pulled up then and went to Natchez to my father’s people.  She made two crops with my young master.  His name was Otie Railey.  Help her?  Well, I was comin’.  I had one brother and one sister.