mother died there with a
congestive chill.

"We come back here to Arkansas after freedom and I think my father
worked for Jack Hall three or four years. He wouldn't let him leave. He
raised my father and thought so much of him. He worked on the shares.

"After freedom I went to school. I learnt to read and write but I
just wouldn't _do_ it. I learnt the other chillun though. I did
_that_. I was into ever'thing. I learnt them that what I could do.
Blue Back? Them's the very ones I studied.

"In slavery times I had to rise as early as I could. Old master would
give me any little thing around the house that I wanted. They said he
was too old to go to war. Some of the hands run off but I didn't know
where they went to.

"Some of the people was better off slaves than they was free. I don't
study bout things now but sometimes seems like all them things comes
before me.

"I used to hear em talkin' bout old Jeff Davis. I didn't know what they
was talkin' bout but I heered em.

"I was sixteen when I married and I had eleven chillun. All dead but
four.

"Yes'm, I been treated good all my life by white and black. All of em
loved me seemed like.

"I been livin' in Arkansas all my life. I never have worked in the
field. I always worked in the house. I always was a seamstress--made
pants for the men on the place.

"After I come here to Pine Bluff I worked for the white folks. Used to
cook and wash and iron. Done a lot of work. I _did_ that.

"I been blind 'leven years but I thank the Lord I been here that long.
Glory to Jesus! Oh, Lord have mercy! Glory, glory, glory to Jesus!"

Interviewer: Miss Irene Robertson
Person interviewed: Clay Reaves, (light mulatto, large man)
Palestine, Arkansas
Age: 80

"I will be eighty years old my next birthday. It will be July 6th.
Father was bought from Kentucky. I couldn't tell you about him. He
stayed on the Reaves place that year, the year of the surrender, and
left. He didn't live with mother ever again. I never did hear no reason.
He went on Joe Night's farm. He left me and a sister older but there was
one dead between us. Mother raised us. She stayed on with the Reaves two
years after he left. The last year she was there she hired to them. The
only thing she ever done before freedom was cook and weave. She had her
loom in the kitchen. It was a great big kitchen built off from the house
and a portico joined it to the house. I used to lay up under he