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ting a pension for about two years and were on relief for two or three years before that. Every two weeks we would then get five or six dollars worth of food. Our biggest debt is a doctor bill of about $60.00. Some of the colored folks are better off today and some are worse. The young race says we who was slaves are ten times worse off than they cause we had bosses and couldn’t read or write. But I say the young race has got all this to go by and they ought to be much better off than they are. We are better off in one sense than the young race cause about half of them don’t know how to raise their children and they don’t know how to do nothing. I think our folks have just as good a chance now as the white folks but they don’t get cultivated . They say today that I don’t know nothing cause I was a slave and all I learned was what the marster told me. But I know enough to keep out of devilment. I think all this speed shows that people ain’t got no sense. Sebastian County Hart, Laura Age: 85 Eleventh and Orange Street Pine Bluff, Arkansas Interviewer: Bernice Bowden [M:9: pt. 3: 190–92] “I just can’t tell you when I was born cause I don’t know. My mother said I was born on Christmas Eve morning. I’m a old woman. I was big enough to work in slave times. “Yes ma’am, I member when the war started. I was born in Arkansas. I’m a Arkansas Hoosier.You know I had to have some age on me to work in slave times. “I pulled corn, picked cotton and drive the mule at the gin. Just walked behind him all day. I’ve pulled fodder, pulled cotton stalks, chopped down corn stalks. I never worked in the house when I was a child while I was under the jurisdiction of the white folks. “My old master was Sam Carson and his wife was named Phoebe Carson, boy named Andrew and a daughter named Mary and one named Rosie. “We had plenty to eat and went to church on Sunday. After the white folks had their services we went in. The church was on his place right across the river. That’s where I was when freedom taken place. 355 Lankfordtext:Lankford / Final Pages 7/14/09 10:06 AM Page 355 “When the war started—I remember that all right—cause when they was gettin’started old master sent a colored man to take his son’s place in the war. “I was born up here at Fort Smith and brought here to Jefferson County and sold—my mother and three chillun. “Now wait—I’m goin’to give you the full history.My father’s mother was a white woman from the North and my father was a colored man. Her folks run her here to Arkansas and she stayed with her brother till my father was nine months old and then she went back North and my papa stayed with his uncle. “When his uncle died he willed my papa his place. He had it recorded at the cotehouse in Little Rock that my papa was a free man. But he couldn’t stay in Arkansas free, so he just rambled till he found old man Carson and my mother. He offered to buy my mother but old master wouldn’t sell her so he stayed with old man Carson till they was all free. “My white folks was tollable fair—they didn’t beat up the people. “My mother was as bright as you are. She could sit on her hair. Her mother was a Creole and her father was a Frenchman. After freedom they would a killed my father if it hadn’t been for old Sam Carson, cause they thought my mother was a white woman, she was so bright. “Ku Klux? The Lord have mercy! I remember them. They came and surrounded the house, hundreds of em. We had a loose plank in the floor and we’d hide under the floor with the dogs and stay there, too, till they’d gone. “My father was a gambler. He gambled and farmed. My mother was a Christian woman.When I got big enough to know anything,she...

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