Sales and Separations

“My mother was separated from her mother when she was three years old.  They sold my mother away from my grandmother.  She don’t know nothing about her people.  She never did see her mother’s folks.  She heard from them.  It must have been after freedom.  But she never did get no full understanding about them.  Some of them was in Kansas City, Kansas.  My grandmother, I don’t know what became of her.

“When my mother was sold into St. Louis, they would have sold me away from her but she cried and went on so that they bought me too.  I don’t know nothing about it myself, but my mother told me.  I was just nine months old then.  They would call it refugeeing.  These people that had raised her wanted to get something out of her because they found out that the colored people was going to be free.  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.

Marriages

“My mother used to laugh at that.  The master would do all the marryin’.  I have heard her say that many a time.  They would call themselves jumpin’ the broom.  I don’t know what they did.  Whatever the master said put them together.  I don’t know just how it was fixed up, but they helt the broom and master would say, ‘I pronounce you man and wife’ or something like that.

Ku Klux

“My mother talked about the Ku Klux but I don’t know much about them.  She talked about how they would ride and how they would go in and destroy different people’s things.  Go in the smoke house and eat the people’s stuff.  She said that they didn’t give the colored people much trouble.  Sometimes they would give them something to eat.

“When they went to a place where they didn’t give the colored people much to eat, what they didn’t destroy they would say, ‘Go get it.’  I don’t know how it was but the Ku Klux didn’t have much use for certain white people and they would destroy everything they had.

“I have lived in Arkansas about all my life.  I have been in Little Rock ever since January 30, 1879.  I don’t know how I happened to move on my birthday.  My husband brought me here for my rheumatism.

“I married in 1879 and moved here from Marianna.  I had lived in Helena before Marianna.

Voting

“The niggers voted in Marianna and in Helena.  They voted in Little Rock too.  I didn’t know any of them.  It seems like some of the people didn’t make so much talk about it.  They did, I guess, though.  Many of the farmers would tell their hands who they wanted them to vote for, and they would do it.