Marriage

“I was married in 1883.  My wife’s name was Mary Elston.  Her mother died when she was an infant.  Her grandmother was an Elston at first.  Then she changed her name to Cunningham.  But she always went in the name of Elston, and was an Elston when she married me.  My wife I mean.  I married on a Thursday in the Christmas week.  This December I will be married fifty-five years.  This is the only wife I have ever had.  We had three children and all of them are dead.  All our birthed children are dead.  One of them was just three months old when he died.  My baby girl had three children and she lived to see all of them married.

Opinions

“Our own folks is about the worst enemies we have.  They will come and sweet talk you and then work against you.  I had a fellow in here not long ago who came here for a dollar, and I never did hear from him again after he got it.  He couldn’t get another favor from me.  No man can fool me more than one time.  I have been beat out of lots of money and I have got hurt trying to help people.

“The young folks now is just gone astray.  I tell you the truth, I wouldn’t give you forty cents a dozen for these young folks.  They are sassy and disrespectful.  Don’t respect themselves and nobody else.  When they get off from home, they’ll respect somebody else better ’n they will their own mothers.

“If they would do away with this stock law, they would do better everywhere.  If you would say fence up your place and raise what you want, I could get along.  But you have to keep somebody to watch your stock.  If you don’t, you’ll have to pay something out.  It’s a bad old thing this stock law.  It’s detrimental to the welfare of man.”

Interviewer:  Mrs. Bernice Bowden
Person interviewed:  Lewis Mann
                    1501 Bell Street, Pine Bluff, Arkansas
Age:  81

“As nigh as I can come at it, I was bout five or six time of the war.  I remember when the war ceasted.  I was a good-sized chap.

“Durin’ the war my mother’s master sent us to Texas; western Texas is whar they stopped me.  We stayed there two years and then they brought us back after surrender.

“I remember when the war ceasted and remember the soldiers refugeein’ through the country.  I’m somewhar round eighty-one.  I’m tellin’ you the truf.  I ain’t just now come here.

“I was born right here in Arkansas.  My mother’s master was old B.D.  Williams of Tennessee and we worked for his son Mac H. Williams here in Arkansas.  They was good to my mother.  Always had nurses for the colored childrun while the old folks was in the field.

“After the war I used to work in the house for my white folks—­for Dr. Bob Williams way up there in the country on the river.  I stayed with his brother Mac Williams might near twenty-five or thirty years.  Worked around the house servin’ and doin’ arrands different places.