Bearing Witness: Memories of Arkansas Slavery

Lee County

hers. I married in my mother and father’s home and I had my wedding jest as near like Miss Liza’s as I could. I had a long white dress and a long veil and a big bouquet of flowers. I didn’t have things as fine as she did but I done my best. She had roses and I had jest common paper flowers. Her dress was satin and mine was cotton, my veil was cotton, too, but I thought it was fine and so did everybody else.We married on Christmas night and we had a big supper . Dey was as many white folks dere as colored and we had a grand time. De next day we went to housekeepin’ and we lived together till nineteen year ago when my husband died. I had fifteen children but dere is only three living today. Lee County Thomas, Omelia Age: 63 1014 W. Fifth Street Little Rock, Arkansas Interviewer: Samuel S. Taylor [M:10: pt. 6: 300–303] “I was born in Marianna, Lee County, in Arkansas. I wasn’t born right in the town but out a piece from the town in the old Bouden place, in 1875. My father kept a record of all births and deaths in his Bible.He never forgot whenever a new baby would come to get down his glasses and pen and ink and Bible. My daddy learned to read and write after the emancipation. “My father’s name was Frank Johnson and my mother’s name was Henrietta Johnson. I don’t know the given names of my father’s and mother’s parents. I do know my mother’s mother’s name, Lucinda, and my father’s mother was named Stephens. I don’t know their given names. My mother’s master was a Trotter. “My father was a free man. He hired his own time. He told me that his father hired his own time and he would go off and work. He made washpots. He would go off and work and bring back money and things. His mother was free too. When war was declared, he volunteered to go. He was with the Yankees. My father worked just like my grandfather did. Whenever he had a job to do. He never had a lick from anybody, carried his gun strapped down on his side all the time and never went without it. “After the War, he worked on a steamboat. They used to kick the 228 Lankfordtext:Lankford / Final Pages 7/14/09 10:06 AM Page 228 roustabouts about and run them around but they never laid the weight of their hands on him. “They wouldn’t allow him to go to school in slavery time. After the War, he got a Blue Back Speller and would make a bowl of fire and at night he would study—sometimes until daybreak. Then he found an old man that would help him and he studied under him for a while. He never went to any regular school, but he went to night school a little. Most of what he got, he got himself. “He was born in Louisville, Kentucky. I don’t know how he happened to meet my mother. During the time after the War, he went to running on the boat from New Orleans to Friars (Friar) Point, Mississippi. Then he would come over to Helena. In going ’round, he met my mother near Marianna and married her. “Mother never had much to say,and the other girls would have a big time talking. He noticed that she was sewing with ravelings and he said,‘Lady, next time I come I’ll bring you a spool of thread if you don’t mind.’ He brought the thread and she didn’t mind, and from then on, they went to courting. Finally they married. They married very shortly after the War. “My mother was a motherless girl. My daddy said he looked at her struggling along.All the other girls were trying to have a good time. But she would be settin’ down trying to make a quilt or something else useful, and he said to a friend of his,‘That woman would make a good wife; I am going to marry her.’ And he did. “She used to spin her fine and coarse sewing thread and yarn to make socks and stockings with. Her stockings and socks for the babies and papa would always be yarn...