"When we was small, my daddy would make horse collars, cotton baskets and mattresses at night and work in the field in the daytime and preach on Sunday. He fell down in Bedie Kellog's lot throwin' up shucks in the barn. He was standin' on the wagon and I guess he lost his balance. They sent and got the best doctor in the country and he said he broke his nabel string. They preached his funeral ever year for five years. Seemed like they just couldn't give him up.
"White folks told my mother if she wouldn't marry again and mess up Uncle Jake's chillun, they'd help her, but she married that man and he beat us so I don't know how I can remember anything. He wouldn't let us go to school. Had to work and just live like pigs.
"Oh, I used to be a tiger bout work, but I fell on the ice in 'twenty-nine and I ain't never got over it. I said I just had a death shock.
"I never went to school but three months in my life. Didn't go long enough to learn anything.
"I was bout a mile from where I was born when I professed religion. My daddy had taught us the right way. I tell you, in them days you couldn't join the church unless you had been changed.
"I come here when they was emigratin' the folks here to Arkansas."
Interviewer: Miss Irene Robertson
Person interviewed: Liney Chambers, Brinkley, Arkansas
Age:
[TR: Some word pronunciation was marked in this interview. Letters surrounded by [] represent long vowels.]