“I get along tolerably now for an old man.  The welfare gives me a little help.  But I have to pay five dollars for these two rooms every month.  What’s more, I got to eat, and I got to have somethin’ to wear.  Washington won’t allow me nothin’ for my army service.  They say I wasn’t regular.  I gets eight dollars from the Welfare.

Opinions

“The young people’s terrible.  They rather go to the penitentiary or the county farm or get killed than to do what is right.

Voting and Vocational Experiences

“I used to vote.  I never had no trouble about it.

“They tried to whip me once since freedom, but not about votin’.  A man tried to whip me down in Stoneville because another man give me a drink.  He tried to cut me with his knife.  I knocked him down.  I told him I could kill him, but I just didn’t want to.  While I was swearing out a warrant to get him arrested, he went and got a gun somewheres.  He came right on in with his pistol and struck me with it.  I knocked him down again, and he was dead for twenty-five minutes.  They didn’t have to go nowheres to serve the warrant on him.  Nobody did anything to me about it.

“I come to Little Rock fifty years ago or more.  I farmed as long as I was able.  Doctor stopped me when I began to fall out.

“I cooked for Dr. Stone and his wife for ten years in Greenville, Mississippi.  Then I come to Pine Bluff on a vacation.  The next time they give me a vacation, I stayed away for eleven years.  I went to get some money Dr. Stone owed me for some work I had done for him once and he wanted me to come back and cook again.  I didn’t do that and he died without paying me for the work.  He said it was his brother that owed me.  But it was him that hired me.  I ’tended to some mules for nine months at four dollars a week.  I never got but one four dollars.  The miles belonged to him and his brother both, but it was him that hired me.  It wasn’t Captain Stone, his brother.  It was him, and I looked to the man that hired me for my money.  I didn’t have nothing to do with nobody but him.  It was him promised to pay me.”

Interviewer’s Comment

Throughout his story Tims carefully avoided using his first name.  Never at any time did he let it slip.

The capture of New Orleans was effected in 1862.  If the troop with which he worked took part in the capture, he must have been twelve years old by 1862, and his age must be at least eighty-eight.  But this would be inconsistent with his statement that he served Sergeant Josephus for two years and a half.  The detachment might have gone to New Orleans later than ’62.  At any rate, Tims is at least eighty-five, and possibly older.  Here again we have a definite conviction of the use of the word Ku Klux before the War.  The way he talks of it, the term might have been a colloquial term applied to a jayhawker or a patroller.  He doesn’t mean Ku Klux Klan when he says Ku Klux.