United States. Work Projects Administration

“ They tramped the wheat and oats and cotton down and turned the horses in on the corn. The slaves show did hate to see the Yankees waste everything. They promised a lot and wasn't as good as the old masters. All dey wanted was to be waited on too. The colored folks was freed when the Yankees took all the stock and cattle and rations. Everybody had to leave and let the government issue them rations. Everybody was proud to be free. They shouted and sung. They all did pretty well till the war was about to end then they was told to scatter and no whars to go. Cabins all tore down or burned. ”

“ I heard my mother say she dress up in some of the white folks dresses and hitch up the buggy, take dinner and carry two girls nearly grown out to church and to big picnics. She liked that. The servants would set the table and help the white folks plates at the table. Said they had a heap good eating. She had a plenty work to do but she got to take the girls places where the parents didn't want to go. She said they didn't know what to do wid freedom. She said it was like weening a child what never learned to eat yet. I forgot what they did do. She said work was hard to find and money scarce. ”

“ Mac McClendon and John Mourning was two nigger traders and they brought my mother and sister Nancy and sister Liza and my sister Anna and Hardy Miller—that's me—out here on the train from Americus, Georgia to Memphis and put us on a steamboat and brought us here to Pine Bluff and sold me to Dr. Pope. He was a poor white man and he wanted a pair of niggers. He bought me and Laura Beckwith. In them days a doctor examined you and if your heart was sound and your lungs was sound and you didn't have no broken bones—have to pay one hundred dollars for every year you was old. ”

“ I knowed a heap o' people said they was doing so well I come too. I come on the train.
"I ain't got no home, no land. I got a hog. No garden. Two times in the year now is hard—winter and simmer. In some ways times is better. In some ways they is worser. When a trade used to be made to let you have provisions, you know you would not starve. Now if you can't get work you 'bout starve and can't get no credit. Crops been good last few years and prices fair fur it. But money won't buy nothin' now. Everything is so high. Meat is so high. Working man have to eat meat. If he don't he get weak. ”

“ The South looked shabby.
"I haven't voted since 1927 except I voted in favor of the Cotton Control Saturday before last.
"Times has come up to a most deplorable condition. Craving exists. Ungratefulness. People want more than they can make. Some don't work hard and some won't work at all. I don't know how to improve conditions except by work except economical living. Some would work if they could. Some can work but won't. Some do work hard. I believe in bread by the sweat of the brow, and all work.
"The slaves didn't expect anything. ”

“ Bob, our young master, took care of his mama and the slaves. All the grown folks went to the field to work and the little chillun would be left at a big room called the nursing home. All us little ones would be nursed and fed by an old mammy, Aunt Mandy. She was too old to go to the field, you know. We wouldn't see our mammy and daddy from early in the morning till night when their work was done, then they'd go by Aunt Mandy's and get their chillun and go home till work time in the morning. ”

“ Every nation will have to appear before God and be judged in a twinklin of an eye. If you aren't prepared before Jesus comes, it will be too late. God is everywhere, he is the almight. God is a nice God, he is a clean God, he is a good God. ”

“ After the war, it wasn't long before they began to open up schools. They used to run school three or four months a year. Both white and colored in the country had about three or four months. That is all they had. There weren't so very many white folks that took an interest in education during slave time. Colored people got just about as much as they did right after the war. ”

“ My mother was a field woman. When they didn't need her to work they hired her out and they got the pay. The master mated the colored people. I got fed from the white folks table whenever I curried the horses. I was sorter raised up with Mr. Nealy's children. They didn't mistreat me. On Saturday the mistress would blow a cone shell and they knowed to go and get the rations. We got plenty to eat. They had chickens and ducks and geese and plenty milk. They did have hogs. They had seven or eight guineas and a lot of peafowls. I never heard a farm bell till I come to Arkansas. ”

“ Everybody left and a heap of the colored folks went where rations could be issued to them and some followed on in the armies. After I was mustered out I stayed around the camps and went to my sister's cabin till we left there. Made anything we could pick up. Men come in there getting people to go work for them. Some folks went to Chicago. A heap of the slaves went to the northern cities. Colonel Stocker, a officer in the Yankee army, got us to come to a farm in Arkansas. We wanted to stay together is why we all went on the farm. ”

“ Her husband, my grandfather, was a blacksmith, and he never did work in the field. He made wagons, plows, plowstocks, buzzard wings—they call them turning plows now. They used to make and put them on the stocks. He made anything-handles, baskets. He could fill wagon wheels. He could sharpen tools. Anything that come under the line of blacksmith, that is what he did. He used to fix wagons all the time I knowed him. In harvest time in the fall he would drive from Bienville where they were slaves to Monroe in Ouachita Parish. ”

“ Those white people in Missouri didn't have many slaves. They just had four slaves—my mother, myself, another woman and an old colored man called Uncle Joe. They didn't get to sell him because he bought hisself. He made a little money working on people with rheumatism. They would ran the niggers from state to state about that time to keep them from getting free and to get something out of them. My mother was sold into Mississippi after freedom. Then she was refugeed from one place to another through Helena to Trenton (?) , Arkansas. ”

“ Right after the war, my parents farmed. He followed his trade. That always gave us something to eat you know. When we farmed, we sharecropped—a third and a fourth—that is, we got a third of the cotton and a fourth of the corn. Potatoes and things like that went free. All women got an acre free. My mother always got an acre and she worked it good too. She always had her bale of cotton. And if she didn't have a bale, she laid it next to the white folks' and made it out. ”

“ First work I got in Arkansas was working on a farm; me and her both; we always tried to stay together. We could not make anything on the Garner farm, and it was mighty unhealthy down in Fourche bottoms. I carried her back to Little Rock and I got work as house man in the Bunch home. From there I went to the home of Dudley E. Jones and stayed there 28 years. That was the beginning of my catering. I just naturally took to cooking and serving. White folks was still used to having colored wait on them and they liked my style. ”

“ Father went back and forth to Kansas. They tried to make him leave if he was a free man. They said I would have to be a slave several years or leave the State. Freedom settled that for me.
"My great grandmother on my mother's side belong to Thomas Jefferson. He was good to her. She used to tell me stories on her lap. She come from Virginia to Tennessee. They all cried to go back to Virginia and their master got mad and sold them. He was a meaner man. ”

“ We all lived with the white folks. My mother took care of all of them. They was always as good as they could be to us and after the war we stayed on with the white folks who owned my father and worked on the farm for him. His master gave us half of everything we made until we could get started our selves, then our white folks told my father to homestead a place near him, and he did. We lived there until after father died. We paid taxes and lived just like the white folks. We did what the white folks told us to do and never lost a thing by doing it. ”

“ I never got no schoolin. I went with old missus to camp meeting down in Georgia one time and got to go to white church sometimes. At the camp meeting there was a big tent and all around it there was brush harbors and tents where people stayed to attend the meetins. They had four meetins a day. Lots of folk got converted and shouted. They had a lot of singings They had a lots to eat and a big time.
I don't think much about these young folks now. It seems lack everybody is having a hard time to live among us colored folks. Some white folks has got a heap and fine cars to get about in. ”

“ Another thing—the education being given them—they are not taking advantage of it. If they would profit by what they learn they could benefit theirselves. A lot of them now spend heap of time trying to get to be doctors and lawyers and like that. That is a mistake. There is not enough work among colored people to support them. I know. Negroes do not have confidence in their race for this kind of business. No ma'am. Colored will go for a white doctor and white lawyer 'cause they think they know more about that kind of business. ”

“ Meal, meat, molasses were the only rations I saw. In those times the white people had what was known as the white people's house and then what was known as nigger quarters. The children that weren't big enough to work were fed at the white people's house. We got milk and mush for breakfast. When they boiled cabbage we got bread and pot-liquor. For supper we got milk and bread. They had cows and the children were fed mostly on milk and mush or milk and bread. We used to bake a corn cake in the ashes, ash cake, and put it in the milk.
"The chickens used to lay out in the barn. ”