“I have followed farming all my life.  That is the sweetest life a man can lead.  I have been farming all my life principally.  My occupation is farming.  That is it was until I lost my health.  I ain’t done nothin’ for about four years now.  I would follow public work in the fall of the year and make a crop every year.  Never failed till I got disabled.  I used to make all I used and all I needed to feed my stock.  I even raised my own wheat before I left home in Alabama.  That is a wheat country.  They don’t raise it out here.[HW:  ?]

“I came here—­lemme see, about how many years ago did I come here.  I guess I have been in Arkansas about twenty-eight years since the first time I come here.  I have gone in and out as I got a chance to work somewheres.  I have been living in this house about three years.

“I preached for about twenty or more years.  I don’t know that I call myself a preacher.  I am a pretty good talker sometimes.  I have never pastored a church; somehow or ’nother the word come to me to go and I go and talk.  I ain’t no pulpit chinch.  I could have taken two or three men’s churches out from under them, but I didn’t.

Freedom and Soldiers

“I can’t remember just how my father got freed.  Old folks then didn’t let you stan’ and listen when they talked.  If you did it once, you didn’t do it again.  They would talk while they were together, but the children would have business outdoors.  Yes siree, I never heard them say much about how they got freedom.

“I was there when the Yankees come through.  That was in slave time.  They marched right through old man Madden’s grove.  They were playing the fifes and beating the drums.  And they were playing the fiddle.  Yes sir, they were playing the fiddle too.  It must have been a fiddle; it sounded just like one.  The soldiers were all just a singin’.  They didn’t bother nobody at our house.  If they bothered anything, nothing was told me about it.  I heard my uncle say they took a horse from my old manager.  I didn’t see it.  They took the best horse in the lot my uncle said.  Pardon me, they didn’t take him.  A peckerwood took him and let the Yankees get him.  I have heard that they bothered plenty of other places.  Took the best mules, and left old broken down ones and things like that.  Broke things up.  I have heard that about other places, but I didn’t see any of it.

Right after the War

“Right after the War, my father went to farming—­renting land.  I mean he sharecropped and done around.  Thing is come way up from then when the Negroes first started.  They didn’t have no stock nor nothin’ then.  They made a crop just for the third of it.  When they quit the third, they started givin’ them two-fifths.  That’s more than a third, ain’t it?  Then they moved up from that, and give them half, and they are there yet.  If you furnish, they give you two-thirds and take one-third.  Or they give you so much per acre or give him produce in rent.