“My parents was first married under a twenty-five cents license law in Virginia.  After freedom they was remarried under a new law and the license cost more but I forgot how much.  They had fourteen children to my knowing.  After the war you could register under any name you give yourself.  My father went by the name of Right Dixon and mother Jilly Dixon.

“The Ku Klux was bad.  They was a band of land owners what took the law in hand.  I was a boy.  I scared to be caught out.  They took the place of pattyrollers before freedom.

“I never went to public school but two days in my life.  I went to night school and paid Mr. J.C.  Price and Mr. S.H.  Vick to teach me.  My father got his leg shot off and I had to work.  It kept me out of meanness.  Work and that woman has kept me right.  I come to Arkansas, brought my wife and one child, April 5, 1889.  We come from Wilson, North Carolina.  Her people come from North Carolina and Moultrie, Georgia.

“I do vote.  I sell eggs or a little something and keep my taxes paid up.  It look like I’m the kind of folks the government would help—­them that works and tries hard to have something—­but seems like they don’t get no help.  They wouldn’t help me if I was bout to starve.  I vote a Republican ticket.”

Note:  On the wall in the dining room, used as a sitting room, was a framed picture of Booker T. Washington and Teddy Roosevelt sitting at a round-shaped hotel dining table ready to be served.  Underneath the picture in large print was “Equality.”  I didn’t appear to ever see the picture.

This negro is well-fixed for living at home.  He is large and very black, but his wife is a light mulatto with curly, nearly-straightened hair.

Interviewer:  Miss Irene Robertson
Person interviewed:  Martha Ann Dixon (mulatto)
                    DeValls Bluff, Arkansas
Age:  81

“I am eighty-one years old.  I was born close to Saratoga, North Carolina.  My mother died before I can recollect and my grandmother raised me.  They said my father was a white man.  They said Jim Beckton.  I don’t recollect him.  My mother was named Mariah Tyson.

“I recollect how things was.  My grandmother was Miss Nancy Tyson’s cook.  She had one son named Mr. Seth Tyson.  He run her farm.  They et in the dining room, we et in the kitchen.  Clothes and something to eat was scarce.  I worked at whatever I was told to do.  Grandma told me things to do and Miss Nancy told me what to do.  I went to the field when I was pretty little.  Once my uncle left the mule standing out in the field and went off to do something else.  It come up a hard shower.  I crawled under the mule.  If I had been still it would been all right but my hair stood up and tickled the mule’s stomach.  The mule jumped and the plough hit me in my hip here at the side.  It is a wonder I didn’t get killed.

“After the Civil War was times like now.  Money scarce and prices high, and you had to start all over new.  Pigs was hard to start, mules and horses was mighty scarce.  Seed was scarce.  Everything had to be started from the stump.  Something to eat was mighty plain and scarce and one or two dresses a year had to do.  Folks didn’t study about going so much.