"When anybody died everybody stopped working and moaned and prayed until after the burying.
"I can say there is as much difference between now and sixty years ago as it is in day and night."
Interviewer: S. S. Taylor
Person interviewed: Henry Banner
County Hospital
Little Rock, Ark.
Age: ?
[HW: Forty Acres and a Mule]
"I was sold the third year of the war for fifteen years old. That would be in 1864. That would make my birthday come in 1849. I must have been 12 year old when the war started and sixteen when Lee surrendered. I was born and raised in Russell County, Ol' Virginny. I was sold out of Russell County during the war. Ol' Man Menefee refugeed me into Tennessee near Knoxville. They sold me down there to a man named Jim Maddison. He carried me down in Virginny near Lynchburg and sold me to Jim Alec Wright. He was the man I was with in the time of the surrender. Then I was in a town called Liberty. The last time I was sold, I sold for $2,300,—more than I'm worth now.
"Police were for white folks. Patteroles were for niggers. If they caught niggers out without a pass they would whip them. The patteroles were for darkies, police for other people.
"They run me once, and I ran home. I had a dog at home, and there wasn't no chance them gettin' by that dog. They caught me once in Liberty, and Mrs. Charlie Crenchaw, Ol' John Crenchaw's daughter, came out and made them turn me loose. She said, 'They are our darkies; turn them loose.'
"One of them got after me one night. I ran through a gate and he couldn't get through. Every time I looked around, I would see through the trees some bush or other and think it was him gaining on me. God knows! I ran myself to death and got home and fell down on the floor.