randpa got to go
every now and then. Magnolia was no city in them days.

"It is hard to raise children in this day and time. When I went on the
Betzner place (near Biscoe, Arkansas) my son was eight years old. He
growed up along side Brooks (Betzner). I purt nigh talked my tongue out
of my head and Brooks' (white boy) mother did the same thing. Every year
when we would lay by, me and my husband (white Negro) would go on a
camp. Brooks would ask me if he could go. We took the two of them. (The
Hawkens boy is said to be a dark mulatto--ed.) He's a smart boy, a good
farmer down in Lee County now. He married when he was nineteen years
old. It is hard to raise a boy now. There is boxing and prize fighting
and pool halls and _that's not right_! Times are not improving as I can
see in that way. Worse than I have ever seen them."

Interviewer: Mrs. Bernice Bowden
Person interviewed: Becky Hawkins
717 Louisiana Street, Pine Bluff, Arkansas
Age: 75

"Yes'm, I was born in slave times but my mammy was sucklin' me. Don't
know much bout slavery but just come up free.

"My mammy's old master was Calvin Goodloe in Alabama, Pulaski County,
near Tuscumbia. I heered my uncle say old master favored his niggers.

"Mammy told me bout em gettin' whippin's, but she never let the overseer
whip her--she'd go to old master.

"My grandmama's hair was straight but she was black. She was mixed
Indian. My mammy's father was Indian and she say he fought in the
Revolution. She had his pistol and rocks. When he died he was the oldest
man around there.

"I tell you what I remember. I 'member my mammy had a son named Enoch
and he nussed me in slave days when mammy was workin' in the field. They
didn't low em to go to the house but three times a day--that was the
women what had babies. But I was so sickly mammy had Enoch bring me to
the fence so she could suckle me.

"I went to school down here in Arkansas in Lincoln County. I got so I
could read in McGuffy's Fourth Reader. I member that story bout the
white man chunkin' the boy down out of the apple tree.

"That was a government school on the railroad--notch house. Just had one
door and one window. They took the nigger cabins and made a
schoolhouse.

"After freedom my mammy stayed on old master's place--he didn't drive em
away. My mammy spinned the raw cotton and took it to Tuscumbia and got
it wove. Some of it she dyed. I know when I was a gal I wore a che