"We've got to do something 'bout this younger generation. You never
saw anything sicker. They is degenerating.

"I hold up my right hand, swear to uphold the Constitution and
preserve the flag and I don't think justice is being done when they
won't let the colored folks vote. We'd like to harmonize things here.
God made us all and said 'You is my chillun.'"

Interviewer: Miss Irene Robertson
Person interviewed: Bessie Lawsom,
Helena, Arkansas
Age: 76
[Date Stamp: MAY 31 1938]

"I was born in Georgia. My mama was brought from Virginia to one of
the Carolina states, then to Georgia. She was sold twice. I don't
recollect but one of her masters. I heard her speak of Master
Bracknell. His wife, now I remember her well. She nursed me. I was
sickly and they needed her to work in the crop so bad. She done had a
baby leetle older than I was, so I nursed one breast and Jim the
other. She raised me and Jim together. Mama was name Sallie and papa
Mathew Bracknell. They called him Mat Bracknell. I don't know my
master's name. They had other children.

"Me and Jim dug wells out in the yard and buried all the little ducks
and chickens and made graves. We had a regular burying ground we made.
They treated us pretty good as fur as I knowed. I never heard mama
complain. She lived till I was forty years old. Papa died a few years
after freedom. He had typhoid fever. He was great to fish. I believe
now he got some bad water to drink out fishing. There was six of us
and three half children. I'm the onliest one living as I knows of. One
sister died in 1923 in Atlanta. She come to see me. She lived with big
rich folks there. She was a white man's girl. She never had so much
bad luck as we dark skin children the way it was. My papa had to go to
war with some of Master Bracknell's kin folks, maybe his wife's kin
folks, and they took him to wait on them at the battle-fields. Some
soldiers camped by at the last of the war. They stole her out. She
went to take something to a sick widow woman for old mistress. She
never got back for a week. She said she was so scared and one day when
her man, the man that claimed her, went off on a scout trip she asked
a man, seemed to be a big boss, could she go to that thicket and get
some black gum toothbrushes. He let her ride a little old broken down
horse out there. She had a bridle but she was bare back. She come home
through the pasture and one of the colored boys took th