Person Interviewed: Dolly Whiteside (c)
Age: 81
Home: 103 Oregon Street, Pine Bluff, Ark.

"I reckon I did live in slavery times--look at my hair.

"I been down sick--I been right low and they didn't speck me to live.

"Well, I'll tell you. I was old enough to know when they runned us to
Texas so the Yankees couldn't overtaken us. We was in Texas when freedom
come, I remember I was sittin on the fence when the soldiers in them
blue uniforms with gold buttons come. He said, "I come to tell you you
is free". I didn't know what it was all about but everybody was sayin'
"Thank God". I thought it was the judgment day and I was lookin' for
God. I said to myself, I'm goin' have some buttons like that some day.

"Colonel Williams was my marster. My mother was a nurse and took care of
the colored folks when they was sick. I remember when people wasn't
given nothin' but blue mass, calomel, castor oil and gruel, and every
body was healthier than they is now.

"I'm the only one livin' that my mother birthed in this world. I was
born here, but I been travelin', I been to Memphis and around.

"No mam, I don't remember nothin' else. I done tole you all I know."

Interviewer: Samuel S. Taylor
Person interviewed: J.W. Whitfield
3100 W. Seventeenth Street, Little Rock, Arkansas
Age: About 60
Occupation: Preacher

"My father's name was Luke Whitfield. He was sixty-three years old when
he died in 1902. He was twenty-six years old when the Civil War ended.
He was a slave. There were three other boys in the family besides him.
No girls.

"His old mars' name was Bill Carraway. They lived at Nubian [HW: New
Bern], North Carolina.

"My father said that his work in slavery time was blacksmithing. He had
to fix the wagons and the plow too. He said that was his work during the
Civil War too. He worked in the Confederate army too.

"I remember him saying how they whipped him when he ran off. The
overseer got after him to whip him and he and one of his friends ran
off. As they jumped over the fence to go into the woods the old mars hit
my daddy with a cat-o-nine tails. You see, they took a strap of harness
leather and cut it into four thongs and then they took another and cut
it into five thongs, and they tied them together. When you got one blow
you got nine and when you got five blows you got forty-five. As his old
mars hit him, he said. 'I got him one, sir; it was a good one too, sir,
and a go-boy.'[