“I don’t know when freedom came on.  I never did know.  We was five or six years breaking up.  Master Stone never forced any of us to leave.  He give some of them a horse when they left.  I cried a year to go back.  It was a dear place to me and the memories linger with me every day.

“There was no secret society or order of Ku Klux in reach of us as I ever heard.

“I voted Republican ticket.  We would go to Jackson to vote.  There would be a crowd.  The last I voted was for Theodore Roosevelt.  I voted here in Helena for years.  I was on the petit jury for several years here in Helena.

“I farmed in your state some (Arkansas).  I farmed all my young life.  I been in Arkansas sixty years.  I come here February 1879 with distant relatives.  They come south.  When I come to Helena there was but one set of mechanics.  I started to work.  I learned to paint and hang wall paper.  I’ve worked in nearly every house in Helena.

“The present times are gloomy.  I tried to prepare for old age.  I had a apartment house and lost it.  I owned a home and lost it.  They foreclosed me out.

“The present generation is not doing as well as I have.

“My health knocked me out.  My limbs swell, they are stiff.  I have a bad bladder trouble.

“I asked for help but never have got none.  If I could got a little relief I never would lost my house.  They work my wife to death keeping us from starving.  She sewed till they cut off all but white ladies.  When she got sixty-five they let her go and she got a little job cooking.  They never give us no relief.”

Interviewer:  Miss Irene Robertson
Person interviewed:  Nancy Anderson
                    Street H, West Memphis, Arkansas
Age:  66

“I was born at Sanitobia, Mississippi.  Mother died when I was a child.  I was three months old, they said, when I lost her.  Father lived to be very old.  My mother was Ella Geeter and my stepmother was Lucy Evans.  My father’s name was Si Hubbard.  My parents married after the War.  I remembers Grandma Harriett Hubbard.  She said she was sold.  She was a cook and she raised my papa up with white folks.  Her children was sold with her.  Papa was sold too at the same time.  Papa fired a steam gin.  They ground corn and ginned cotton.

“I stayed with Sam Hall’s family.  She was good to me.  I had a small bed by the fireplace.  She kept me with two of her own children.  Some of the girls and boys I was raised up with live at Sanitobia now and have fine homes.  When we would be playing they would take all the toys from me.  Miss Fannie would say, ‘Poor Nancy ain’t got no toys.’  Then they would put them on the floor and we would all play.  They had a little table.  We all eat at it.  We had our own plates.  We all eat out of tin plates and had tin cups.

“They couldn’t keep me at home when papa married.  I slipped off across the pasture.  There was cows and hogs in there all the time.  I wasn’t afraid of them.  I would get behind Miss Fannie and hide in her dress tail when they come after me.  They let me stay most of the time for about five years.  Sam Hall was good to my father and Miss Fannie about raised me after my mother died.  She made me mind but she was good to me.