They had an old white man who worked there and they treated him so mean
he ran away and left his wife. They treated the poor whites about as bad
as they treated the colored.

If Bob met a Negro carrying cotton to the Gin, he would ask "Whose
cotton is that?", and if the Nigger said it was some white man's, he
would let him alone. But if he said. "Mine", Bob would tell him to take
it to some Gin where he wanted it taken. He was the kind of man that if
you seen him first, you wouldn't meet him.

One night he slipped up on a Nigger man that had left his place and
killed him as he sat at supper. I had an aunt with five or six children
who worker with him. He married my young Mistress after I was freed.

I saw him do this. The white folks had a funeral at the church down
there one Sunday. He came along and young Billie Ward (white man) was
sitting in a buggy driving with his wife. When he saw Billie, he jumped
down out of his buggy and horse-whipped him until he ran away. All the
while, Sawyer's mother-in-law was sitting in his buggy calling out,
"Shoot him, Bob, shoot him." this was because Billie and another man
had done some talk about Bob.

OCCUPATIONS

I came to Brinkley, Arkansas, March 4, 1900, and have been in Arkansas
ever since. Why I came, the postmaster where I was rented farm on which
I was farming. In March he put hands in my field to pick my cotton. All
that was in the field was mine. I knew that I couldn't do anything about
it so I left. A couple of years before that I rented five acres of land
from him for three dollars as acre (verbal agreement) sowed it down in
cotton. It done so well I made five bales of cotton on it. He saw the
prospects were so good that he went to the man who furnished me supplies
and told him that I had agreed to do my work on a third and fourth
(one-third of the seed and one-fourth of the cotton to go to the owner).
He get this although if he had stuck to the agreement he would not have
gotten but fifteen dollars. So he dealt me a blow there, but I got over
it.

Before this I had bought a piece of timber land in Moorehouse parish
(Louisiana) and was expecting to get the money to finish paying for it
from my cotton. The cost was $100.00. So when he put hands in my field,
it made me mad, and I left. (Brooks would have lost most of his cotton
if the hands had picked it.)

At Brinkley, I farmed on halves with Will Carter, one of the richest men
in Monroe County (Arkansas). I