"My wife's been dead five or six years and I live here alone. Yes ma'm! I don't want nobody here with me."
Interviewer: Mrs. Bernice Bowden
Person interviewed: Mary Jane Drucilla Davis
1612 W. Barraque, Pine Bluff, Arkansas
Age: 73
"'Little baby's gone to heaven
To try on his robe
Oh, Lord, I'm most done toiling here
Little baby, m-m-m-m-m-m.'
"Oh, it was so mournful. And let me tell you what they'd do. They'd all march one behind the other and somebody would carry the baby's casket on their shoulder and sing that song. That's the first song I remember. I was three years old and now I'm seventy-three and crippled up with rheumatism.
"My mother had a garden and they went 'round that way to the graveyard and I thought they was buryin' it in the garden. That was in Georgia.
"In the old days when people died they used to sit up and pray all night, but they don't do that now.
"I was married young. I don't love to tell how old but I was fifteen and when I was seventeen I was a widow. I tried and tried to get another husband as good as my first one but I couldn't. I didn't marry then till I was thirty some.
"My parents brought me from Georgia when I was five years old and now I ain't got no blood kin in Pine Bluff.