Part 17

"Their mama had died and some folks said they would raise them and then they sold them. She said they never did know who it was that carried them off in a big carriage. They brought them to Nashville, Tennessee and sold them under a big oak tree. They was tied with a hame string to a hitching ring. Addie wanted to set down and couldn't. She said, 'Betty, wouldn't our mama cry if she could see us off like this?' Mama said they both cried and cried and when the man come to look at them he said he would buy them. They felt better and quit crying. He was such a kind looking young man.

"They lived out from Nashville a piece then. He took them home with him, on a plank across the wagon bed. He was Master Davy Fuller. He had a young wife and a little baby. Her name was Mistress Maude and the baby was Carrie. She was proud of Betty and Addie. They told her their mama died. Mama said she was good to them. She died the year of the surrender and Master Davy took them all to his mother's and his papa put them out to live with a family that worked on his place.

"They went to see Carrie and played with her till Addie married and mama come close to Martin to live with them. Addie took consumption and died, then mama married Frank Bane and he died and I was born.

"My pa was a white man. He was a bachelor, had a little store, and he overcome mama. She never did marry no more. I was her only child. I don't remember the man but mama told me how she got tripped up and nearly died and for me never to let nobody trip me up that way. I sorter recollect the store. It burned down one night. We lived around over there till I was sixteen years old. We moved to a few miles of Corinth, Mississippi on a farm. Mr. Cat Madford was the manager. I got married. I married Will Bratton. We had a home wedding on Sunday evening. It was cold and freezing and the freeze lasted over a week. Will Bratton was black as night. I had one little boy. After mama died Will Bratton went off with another woman. He come back but the place was mine. Mama left it to me. I wouldn't let him stay there. I let him go on where he pleased.

"Times been growing slacker for a long time. People live slack. Young folks coming on slacker and slacker every day. Don't know how to do, don't want to know. They get by better 'en I did. I work in the field and I can't hardly get by. I see folks do nothing all the time. Seem like they happy. Times is hard for some, easy for some. I want to live in the country like I is 'cause I belongs there. I can work and be satisfied! I did own my home. I reckon I still do. I got a little cow and some chickens."

Interviewer: Samuel S. Taylor Person interviewed: Frank Briles 817 Cross Street, Little Rock, Arkansas Age: About 82 or 83

[HW: Gives up the Ghost]

"I was born right here in Arkansas. My father's name was Moses Briles. My mother's name was Judy Briles. Her name before she was married I don't know. They belonged to the Briles. I don't know their first name either.

"My father was under slavery. He chopped cotton and plowed and scraped cotton. That is where I got my part from. He would carry two rows along at once. I was little and couldn't take care of a row by myself. I was born down there along the time of the War, and my father didn't live long afterwards. He died when they was settin' them all free. He was a choppin' for the boss man and they would set them up on blocks and sell them. I don't know who the man was that did the selling, but they tell me they would sell them and buy them.

"I am sick now. My head looks like it's goin' to bust open.

"I have heard them tell about the pateroles. I didn't know them but I heard about them. Them and the Ku Klux was about the same thing. Neither one of them never did bother my folks. It was just like we now, nobody was 'round us and there wasn't no one to bother you at all at Briles' plantation. Briles' plantation I can't remember exactly where it was. It was way down in the west part of Arkansas. Yes, I was born way back south--east--way back. I don't know what the name of the place was but it was in Arkansas. I know that. I don't know nothing about that. My father and mother came from Virginia, they said. My father used to drive cattle there, my mother said. I don't know nothin' except what they told me.

"I learnt a little some thing from my folks. I think of more things every time I talk to somebody. I know one thing. The woman that bossed me, she died. That was about--Lord I was a little bitty of a fellow, didn't know nothin' then. She made clothes for me. She kept me in the house all the time. She was a white woman. I know when they was setting them free. I was goin' down to get a drink of water. My father said. 'Stop, you'll be drowned.' And I said, 'What must I do?' And he said, 'Go back and set down till I come back.' I don't know what my father was doing or where he was going. There was a man--I don't know who--he come 'round and said, 'You're all free.' My mama said, 'Thank God for that. Thank God for that.' That is all I know about that.

"When I got old enough to work they put me in the woods splitting rails and plowing. When I grew up I scraped cotton and worked on the farm. That is where my father would come and say, 'Now, son, if anybody asks you how you feel, tell them the truth.'

"I went to school one session and then the man give down. He got sick and couldn't carry it no longer. His pupils were catching up with him I reckon. It was time to get sick or somethin'.

"I never did marry. I was promised to marry a woman and she died. So I said, 'Well, I will give up the ghost. I won't marry at all.'

"I ain't able to do no work now 'cept a little pittling here and there. I get a pension. It's been cut a whole lot."

Interviewer: Mrs. Bernice Bowden Person interviewed: Mary Ann Brooks James Addition, Pine Bluff, Arkansas Age: 90

"I was born here in Arkansas. Durin' the war we went to Texas and stayed one year and six months.

"My old master was old Dr. Brewster. He bought me when I was a girl eight yeers old. Took me in for a debt. He had a drug store. I was a nurse girl in the house. Stayed in the house all my life.

"I stayed here till Dr. Brewster--Dr. Arthur Brewster was his name--stayed here till he carried me to his brother-in-law Dr. Asa Brunson. Stayed there awhile, then the war started and he carrled us all to Texas.

"I seen some Yankeee after we come back to Arkansas. I wes scared of em.

"I don't knew nothln' bout the war. I wasn't in it. I was livin' but we was in Texas.

"The Ku Klux got after us twice when we was goin' to Texas. We had six wagons, a cart, and a carriage. Old Dr. Brunson rode in the carriage. He'd go ahead and pilot the way. We got lost twice. When we come to Red River it was up and we had to camp there three weeks till the water fell.

"We took some sheep and some cows so we could kill meat on the way. I member we forded Saline River. Dr. Brunson carried us there and stayed till he hired us out.

"After the war ceasted he come after us. Told as we didn't belong to him no more--said we was free as he was. Yankees sent him after us. All the folks come back--all but one famlly.

"I had tolerable good owners. Miss Fanny Brewster good to me.

"Old master got drunk so much. Come home sometimes muddy as a hog. All his chillun was girls. I nursed all the girls but one.

"I was a mighty dancer when I was young--danced all night long. Paddyrollers run us home from dancin' one night.

"I member one song we used to sing:

'Hop light lady Cake was all dough-- Never mind the weather, So the wind don't blow.'

"How many chillun I have? Les see--count em up. Ida, Willie, Clara--had six.

"Some of the young folks nowadays pretty rough. Some of em do right and some don't.

"Never did go to school. Coulda went but papa died and had to go to work.

"I thinks over old times sometimes by myself. Didn't know what freedom was till we was free and didn't hardly know then.

"Well, it's been a long time. All the Brewsters and the Bransons dead and I'm still here--blind. Been blind eight years."

Waters Brooks 1814 Pulaski Street, Little Rock, Ark. Retired railroad worker, No. Pac. 75 [TR: Information moved from bottom of each page.]

[HW: A Railroad Work History]

I was only three years old when peace (1865) was declared. I was born in 1862. Peace was declared in 1865. I remember seeing plenty of men that they said the white folks never whipped. I remember seeing plenty of men that they said bought their own freedom.

I remember a woman that they said fought with the overseer for a whole day and stripped him naked as the day he was born. She was Nancy Ward. Her owner was named Billie Ward. He had an overseer named Roper. Her husband ran away from the white folks and stayed three years. He was in the Bayou in a boat and the bottom dropped out of it. He climbed a tree and hollered for someone to tel his master to come and get him if he wanted him.

FATHER

My father's master was John T. Williams. He went into the army--the rebel army--and taken my father with him. I don't know how long my father stayed in the army but I was only 6 months old when he died. He had some kind of stomach trouble and died a natural death.

MOTHER

My mother and father both belonged to Joe Ward at first but Ward died and his widow married Williams. My mother told me and not only told me but showed me knots across her shoulder where they whipped her from seven in the morning until nine at night. She went into the smoke house to get some meat and they closed in on her and shut the door and strung her up by her hands (her arms were crossed and a rope run from her wrists to the hook in the ceiling on which meat was hung). There were three of them. One would whip until he was tired, and then the other would take it up.

Some years after she got that whipping, her master's child was down to the bayou playing in the water. She told the child to stop playing in the water, and it did not. Instead it threw dirt into the water that had the bluing in it. Then she took the child and threw it into the Bayou. Some way or other the child managed to scramble out. When the child's aunt herd it from the child, she questioned my mother and asked her if she did it. My mother told her "Yes". Then she said. "Well what do you want to own it for? Don't you know if they find it out they will kill you?"

HOW FREEDOM CAME

My mother said that an old white man came through the quarters one morning and said that they were all free--that they could go away or stay where they were or do what they wanted to. If you will go there, I can send you to an old man eighty-six years old who was in General Sherman's army. He came from Mississippi. I don't know where he was a slave. But he can tell you when peace was declared aad what they said and everything.

WHAT THE SLAVES EXPECTED

The slaves were not expecting much but they were expecting more than they got. I am not telling you anything I read in history but I have heard that there was a bounty in the treasury for the ex-slaves, and them alone. And some reason or other they did not pay it off, but the time was coming when they would pay it off. And every man or woman living that was born a slave would benefit from it. They say that Abraham Lincoln principally was killed because he was going to pay this money to the ex-slaves end before they would permit it they killed him. Old man White who lives out in the west part of town was an agent for some Senator who was in Washington, and he charged a dime and took your name and age and the place where you lived.

KU KLUX KLAN

They called the K.K.K. "White Cape". Right there in my neighborhood, there was a colered man who hadn't long come in. The colored man was late coming into the lot to get the mule for the white man and woman he was working for. The white man hit him. The Negro knocked the white man down and was going to kill him when the white man begged him off, telling him that he wouldn't let anybody else hurt him. He (the Negro) went on off and never came back. That night there were two hundred White Caps looking for him but they didn't find him.

Another man got into an argument. They went to work and it started to rain. The Negro thought that they would stop working because of the rain; so he started home. The man he was working for met him and asked him where he was going. When he told him he started to hit him with the butt end of the gun he was wearing. The Negro knocked his gun up, took it away from him, and drawed down and started to kill him when another Negro knocked the gun up, and saved the white man's life. But the Nigger might as well have killed him because that night seventy-five masked men hunted him. He was hid away by his friends until he got a chance to get away. This man was named Matthew Collins.

There was another case. This was a political one. The colored man wanted to run for representative of some kind. He had been stump speaking. He lived on a white man's place, and the owner came to him and told him he had better get away because a mob was coming after him (not just K.K.K.). He told his wife to go away and stay with his brother but she wouldn't. He hid himself in a trunk and his wife was under the floor with his two children. The white men fired into the house and that didn't do anything, so they throwed a ball of fire into the house and burned his wife and children. Then he rose up and came out of the trunk and hollered, "Look out I'm coming", and he fired a load of buck shot and tore one man nearly in two and ran away in the confusion. The next day he went to the man on whose place he lived, but he told him he couldn't do anything about it.

Another man by the name of Bob Sawyer had a farm near my home and another farm down near Maginty's place. He worked the ????[TR: Illegible] Niggers from one farm to the other.

His boy would ride in front with a rifle and he would be in the rear with a big gun swinging down from his hip. There wae one Nigger who got out and went down to Alexandria (Louisiana). He wrote to the officers and they caught the Nigger and put him into the stocks and brought him back, and the man hadn't done a thing but run away. After that they worked him with a chain holding his legs together so that he could only make short steps.

They had an old white man who worked there and they treated him so mean he ran away and left his wife. They treated the poor whites about as bad as they treated the colored.

If Bob met a Negro carrying cotton to the Gin, he would ask "Whose cotton is that?", and if the Nigger said it was some white man's, he would let him alone. But if he said. "Mine", Bob would tell him to take it to some Gin where he wanted it taken. He was the kind of man that if you seen him first, you wouldn't meet him.

One night he slipped up on a Nigger man that had left his place and killed him as he sat at supper. I had an aunt with five or six children who worker with him. He married my young Mistress after I was freed.

I saw him do this. The white folks had a funeral at the church down there one Sunday. He came along and young Billie Ward (white man) was sitting in a buggy driving with his wife. When he saw Billie, he jumped down out of his buggy and horse-whipped him until he ran away. All the while, Sawyer's mother-in-law was sitting in his buggy calling out, "Shoot him, Bob, shoot him." this was because Billie and another man had done some talk about Bob.

OCCUPATIONS

I came to Brinkley, Arkansas, March 4, 1900, and have been in Arkansas ever since. Why I came, the postmaster where I was rented farm on which I was farming. In March he put hands in my field to pick my cotton. All that was in the field was mine. I knew that I couldn't do anything about it so I left. A couple of years before that I rented five acres of land from him for three dollars as acre (verbal agreement) sowed it down in cotton. It done so well I made five bales of cotton on it. He saw the prospects were so good that he went to the man who furnished me supplies and told him that I had agreed to do my work on a third and fourth (one-third of the seed and one-fourth of the cotton to go to the owner). He get this although if he had stuck to the agreement he would not have gotten but fifteen dollars. So he dealt me a blow there, but I got over it.

Before this I had bought a piece of timber land in Moorehouse parish (Louisiana) and was expecting to get the money to finish paying for it from my cotton. The cost was $100.00. So when he put hands in my field, it made me mad, and I left. (Brooks would have lost most of his cotton if the hands had picked it.)

At Brinkley, I farmed on halves with Will Carter, one of the richest men in Monroe County (Arkansas). I done $17.50 worth of work for Carter and he paid me for it. Then he turned around and charged me up with it. When we came to settle up, we couldn't settle. So finally, he said, "Figures don't lie." and I said, "No, figures don't lie but men do." When I sed that I stepped out and didn't get scared until I was half way home. But nobody did anything. He sent for me but I wouldn't go back because I knew what he was doing.

After that I went to Wheatley, Arkansas, about five miles west of Brinkley. I made a crop for Goldberg. Jake Readus was Goldberg's agent. The folks had told the white folks I wasn't no account, so I couldn't get nothing only just a little fat meat and bread, and I got as naked as a jaybird. About the last part of August, when I had done laid by and everything. Jake Readus came by and told me what the Niggers had said and said he knowed it was a lie because I had the best crop on the place.

When Goldberg went to pay me off, he told Dr. Beauregard to come and get his money. I said. "You give me my money; I pay my own debts. You have nothing to do with it." When I said that you could have heard a pin drop. But he gave it to me. Then I called the Doctor and gave him his money and he receipted me. I never stayed there but one year.

I moved then down to Napel[TR: Possibly Kapel] Slough on Dr. West's place. I wanted to rent but Dr. West wouldn't advance me anything unless he took a mortgage on my place; so I wouldn't stay there. I chartered a car and took my things back to Brinkley at a cost of ten dollars. I stayed around Brinkley all the winter.

While I was at Wheatley, there was a man by the name of Will Smith who married the daughter of Dr. Paster, druggist at Brinkley. Now Jim Smith, poor white trash, attempted to assault Will Thomas' daughter. Negro girl. When Thomas heard it, he hunted Jim with a Winchester. When that got out, Deputy Sheriff arrested Will and they said that he was chained when he was brought to trial. He got away from them somehow and went to Jonesboro. I took my horse and rid seven or eight miles to carry his clothes. Another Nigger who had promised to make a crop when he left had the blood beat out of his back because he didn't do it.

The winter, I worked at the Gin and Black Saw Mills. That spring I pulls up and goes to Brises. That was in the year 1903. I made a crop with old man Wiley Wormley one of the biggest Niggers there. I fell short. George Walker furnished what I had.

Then I left and went back to Brinkley and worked at the Sawmill again. That was in 1904. I went to Jonesboro. I had just money enough to go to Jonesboro, and I had a couple of dollars over. I had never been out before that; so I spent that and didn't get any work. I stayed there three days and nights and didn't get anything to eat. Lived in a box car. Then I went to work with the Cotton Belt.

My boarding mistress decided to go up to fifteen dollars for board. I told her I couldn't pay her fifteen dollars for that month, but would begin next month. She wouldn't have that and got the officers to look for my money so I caught the train and went back to Brinkley and worked on the railroad again from the Cotton Belt to the Rock Island.