the Boyd estate. Our children
scattered and we sold some of it. We got twenty acres. Some of it in
woods. I had to sell my cow to bury my granddaughter what lived with
me--taking care of me. Papa tole my son to take care of me and since
he died my son gone stone blind. I ain't got no chickens hardly. I go
hungry nigh all the time. I gets eight dollars for me and my blind son
both. If I could get a cow. We tries to have a garden. They ain't
making nothing on my land this year. I'm having the hardest time I
ever seen in my life. I got a toothpick in my ear and it's rising.
The doctor put some medicine in my ears--both of them.

"When I was in slavery I wore peg shoes. I'd be working and not time
to take off my shoes and fix the tacks--beat 'em down. They made holes
in bottoms of my feet; now they got to be corns and I can't walk and
stand."

Interviewer's Comment

This is another one of those _terrible_ cases. This old woman is on
starvation. She had a cow and can't get another one. The son is blind
but feels about and did milk. The bedbugs are nearly eating her up.
They scald but can't get rid of them. They have a fairly good house to
live in. But the old woman is on starvation and away back eight miles
from Biscoe. I hate to see good old Negroes want for something to eat.
She acts like a small child. Pitiful, so feeble. The second time I
went out there I took her daughter who walks out there every week. We
fixed her up an iron bedstead so she can sleep better. I took her a
small cake. That was her dinner. She had eaten one egg that morning.
She was a clean, kind old woman. Very much like a child. Has a rising
in her head and said she was afraid her head would kill her. She gave
me a gallon of nice figs her daughter picked, so I paid her
twenty-five cents for them. She had plenty figs and no sugar.

Interviewer: Samuel S. Taylor
Person interviewed: Alice Johnson
601 W. Eighth Street, Little Rock, Arkansas
Age: 77

"You want to know what they did in slavery times! They were doin' jus'
what they do now. The white folks was beatin' the niggers, burning 'em
and boilin' 'em, workin' 'em and doin' any other thing they wanted to
do with them. 'Course you wasn't here then to know about nigger dogs
and bull whips, were you? The same thing is goin' on right now. They
got the same bull whips and the same old nigger dogs. If you don't
believe it, go right out here to the county farm and you find