she died. We girls helped and we wash and iron
all we can get now. None of us not on relief (Fannie nor Emma). I can't
wash no more. My hands and arms swell up with rheumatism. I still iron
all I can get.

"The present conditions seems awful unsettled; wages low, prices high
and work scarce at times. Men can get work in the hay two months and
bout two months work in the rice or pickin cotton, either one. Then the
work has played clean out till hay time next year.

"How do they live? Some of their _wifes_ cooks for white people and
they eat all they make up soon as they get paid. Only way they live."

Interviewer: Samuel S. Taylor
Person interviewed: Ervin E. Smith
811 Ringo Street, Little Rock, Arkansas
Age: 84

"I have been in this state for forty-nine years. I will be here fifty
years on the fifteenth of December.

"I was born in Ebenezer Township, York County, South Carolina, on the
twenty-ninth day of April, in 1854. That makes me eighty-four years old
on Friday. I was born on Good Friday--on Good Friday at six o'clock in
the morning.

"I am telling you what I was instructed all of my life. My father, W.D.
Smith, and my mother, Haria, told me these things. My mother carried a
nickname, Salina, all her life, but her real name was Haria.

"I'll tell you how they happened to keep such good records. We had a
little advantage over the other people of that day. My father never
got any school education, but his brothers instructed him--his
half-brothers. They were white. They was good, too. I mean them brothers
thought just as much of me as they did of anybody else. So my father
got pretty good training. He got it from his brothers and that's how he
learned to keep such good records.

Relatives

"I am told my mother cooked for one family for forty-two years. Her
maiden name was Haria Harris. She was three-fourths white. She come from
the Indian tribe--old Catawba Indians. Her own daddy was a white man,
but her Grand daddy on her mother's side was an Indian.

"I am told that the old fellow bought my mother when she was fifteen
years old. Finally he got hold of both my father and my mother. Both of
them put together didn't have half colored blood. He must have loved
them a lot to work so hard to get them together. My father was half
white, but his mother was a mulatto woman (Interpreter's comment--This
should make him a quadroon)[TR: sentence lined out.]; and my mother's
great-gra