Bearing Witness: Memories of Arkansas Slavery

Clark County

“Honey, I just don’t know ’bout this younger generation. I just don’t have no thoughts for ’em, they so wild. I never was a rattlin’ kind of a girl. I always was civilized. Old people in them days didn’t ’low their children to do things. I know when mama called us, we’d better go. They is a heap wusser now. So many of ’em gettin’ into trouble.” Clark County Newton, Pete Age: 83 Clarksville, Arkansas Interviewer: Sallie C. Miller [M:10: pt. 5: 216–18] “My white folks was as good to me as they could be. I ain’t got no kick to make about my white people.The boys was all brave.I was raised on the farm. I staid with my boss till I was nearly grown.When the war got so hot my boss was afraid the ‘Feds’ would get us. He sent my mammy to Texas and sent me in the army with Col. Bashom to take care of his horses. I was about eleven or twelve years old. Col. Bashom was always good to me. He always found a place for me to sleep and eat. Sometimes after the colonel left the folks would run me off and not let me stay but I never told the colonel. I went to Boston, Texas, with the colonel and his men and when he went on the big raid into Missouri he left me in Sevier County, Arkansas, with his horses ‘Little Baldy’ and ‘Orphan Boy.’ They was race horses. The colonel always had race horses. He was killed at Pilot Knob, Missouri. After the colonel was killed his son George (I shore did think a lot of George) come after me and the horses and brought us home. “While I was in Arkadelphia with Col. Bashom’s horses, I went down to the spring to water the horses. The artillery was there cleaning a big cannon they called ‘Old Tom.’ Of course I went up to watch them. One of the men saw me and hollered, ‘Stick his head in the cannon.’ It liked to scared me to death.I jumped on that race horse and run.I reconed I would have been killed but my uncle was there and saw me and stopped the horse. “Another time we went to a place and me and another colored boy was taking care of the horses while our masters eat dinner. I saw some water melons in the garden with a paling fence around it. I said if the other boy would pull a paling off I would crawl through and get us a watermelon. He did but the man who owned the place saw me just as I got the melon and 58 Lankfordtext:Lankford / Final Pages 7/14/09 10:06 AM Page 58 whipped us and told us if we hollered he would kill us. We didn’t holler and we never told Col. Bashom either. “After the war my mammie come back from Texas and took me over to Dover to live but my old boss told her if she would let him have me he would raise and educate me like his own children. When I got back the old boss already had a boy so I went to live with one of his sons. He told me it was time for me to learn how to work. My boss was rough but he was good to me and taught me how to work. The old boss had five sons in the army and all was wounded except one. One of them was shot through and through in the battle of Oak Hill. He got a furlough and come back and died. I left my white folks in 1869 and went to farming for myself up in Hartman bottom. I married when I was about seventeen years old. “They though’ a house near us was hainted. Nobody wanted to live in it so they went to see what the noise was. They found a pet coon with a piece of chain around his neck. The coon would run across the floor and drag the chain. “The children now are bad. No telling what will be in the next twenty or thirty years, everything is so changed now. “I learnt to sing the hymns but never sang in the choir. We sang ‘Dixie,’ ‘John Brown’s Body Lies, etc.,’ ‘Juanita,’ ‘Just Before the Battle, Mother,’ ‘Old Black Joe...