“I never seen no Ku Klux.  I hid if they was about.  I sure did hear bout em.  They didn’t never come on our place.

“I told you I never knowed when freedom come on.

“I went to school in South Carolina.  I went a little four or five years.  I could read, spell, cipher on a slate.  Course I learned to write.  Course I got whoopins; got a heap o’ whoopins.  People tended to childern then.  What kind books did we have?  I read and spelled out of the Blue Back Speller.  We had numbers on our slates.  The teacher set us copies.  We wrote with soapstone.  Some teachers white and some colored.

“Well, course I got a Bible. (disgusted at the question).  I go to church and preachin’ every Sunday.  Yes. ma’am, now.

“I don’t study votin’.  I don’t vote. (disgusted).  I reckon my husband and pa did vote.  I ain’t voted.

“Course I go to town.  I go to keep from gettin’ hungry.

“Me and this old man get demodities and I get some money.

“I told you I don’t bother young folks business.  I thought I told you I don’t.  If I young I could raise somethin’ at home that the reason I go hungry.  I give down.  I know I do get hungry.

“One thing I didn’t tell you.  I made tallow candles when I was a young woman.

“I don’t know nothin’ bout that Civil War.”

Interviewer:  Miss Irene Robertson
Person interviewed:  Peter Brown.  Helena, Arkansas
Age:  86

“I was born on the Woodlawn place.  It was owned by David and Ann Hunt.  I was born a slave boy.  Master Hunt had two sons and one girl.  Bigy and Dunbar was the boys’ names.  Annie was the girl’s name.

“My parents’ names was Jane and William Brown.  Papa said he was a little shirt tail boy when the stars fell.  Grandma Sofa and Grandpa Peter Bane lived on the same place.  I’m named after him.  My papa come from Tennessee to Mississippi.  I never heard ma say where she come from.

“My remembrance of slavery is not at tall favorable.  I heard the master and overseers whooping the slaves b’fore day.  They had stakes fixed in the ground and tied them down on their stomachs stretched out and they beat them with a bull whoop (cowhide woven).  They would break the blisters on them with white oak paddles that had holes in it so it would suck.  They be saying, ‘Oh pray, master.’  He’d say, ’Better pray fer yourself.’  I heard that going on when I was a child morning after morning.  I wasn’t big enough to go to the field.  I didn’t have a hard time then.  Ma had to work when she wasn’t able.  Pa stole her out and one night a small panther smelled them and come on a log up over where they slept in a canebrake.  Pa killed it with a bowie knife.  Ma had a baby out there in the canebrake.  Pa had stole her out.  They went back and they never made her work no more.  She was a fast breeder; she had three sets of twins.  They told him if he would stay out of the woods they wouldn’t make her work no more, take care of her children.  They prized fast breeders.  They would come to see her and bring her things then.  She had ten children, three pairs of twins.  Jonas and Sofa, Peter and Alice, Isaac and Jacob.