hen he started home I know I tried to go
with him. He got a little switch and whipped me. That's the onliest
thing I can remember bout him.

"Billy Cole was my master and I didn't have any mistress cause he
never was married.

"My mother worked in the field and I was out there with her when the
cannons commenced shootin' at Helena. We said they was shootin' at us
and we went to the house. Oh Lord, we said we could see em, Lord yes!

"After surrender, our owner, Billy Cole, told us we was free and that
we could go or stay so we stayed there for four or five years. I don't
know whether we was paid anything or not. After that we just went from
place to place and worked by the day.

"I never did see any Ku Klux but they come to my mother's house one
night and wanted my stepfather to show'em where a man lived. He went
down the road with 'em a piece. They wanted a drink and, oh Lord,
they'd drink mighty nigh a bucket full.

"Oh Lord, when I was young goin' to parties and dances, that was my
rule. Oh Lord, I went to them dances.

"I went to church, too. That was one thing I did do. I ain't able to
go now but I'll tell anybody when I could, I sure went.

"I went to school mighty little--off and on bout two years. I never
learned nothin' though.

"I lived right in Memphis mighty nigh twenty years then I come to
Arkansas bout thirty-two years ago and I'm mighty near right where I
come to Pine Bluff.

"I don't know of anything else but all my days I believe I've worked
hard, cookin' and washin' and ironin'."

Interviewer: Samuel S. Taylor
Person interviewed: Needham Love
1014 W. Seventeenth Street, Little Rock, Arkansas
Age: 80, or older

"Old Joe Love sold us to old Jim McClain, Meridian, Mississippi, and
old McClain brought us down on the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi.
That was during the War. It was down there on a big old plantation
where the cane was high as this house. I was born in Alabama. When the
War started, he brought us all down to Meridian and sold us. He sold
me in my mother's arms.

"We cut down all that cane and woods and cleared up the place on the
Tallahatchie. We did all that before we learned we was free.

"They built log houses for the white and black. They sealed the white
folks' houses and chinked the colored folks'. They didn't have but one
house for the white folks. There was only one white person down there
and that was old Jim McClain. Just come down the