“Grandma said their something to eat got mighty slim in war times and kept getting slimmer and slimmer. They had plenty sorghum all the time. Them troughs was hewed out of a log and was washed and hung in the sun till next mealtime. They cooked in iron pots and skillets on the fire. Grandma worked where they put her but her main trade was seeing after the sick on that place.
“They had a fiddler on the place and had big dances now and then.
“This young generation won’t be advised no way you can fix it. I don’t know what in the world the folks is looking about. The folks ain’t good as they used to be. They shoots craps and drinks and does low-down things all the time. I ain’t got no time with the young generation. Times gone to pieces pretty bad if you axing me.”
#728
Interviewer: Watt McKinney
Person interviewed: James Gill
R.F.D. Marvell, Arkansas
Age: 86
Occupation: Farmer
“Uncle Jim” Gill, an ex-slave eighty-six years of age, owns a nice two hundred acre farm five miles north of Marvell where he has lived for the past thirty-five years. “Uncle Jim” is an excellent citizen, prosperous and conservative and highly respected by both white and colored. This is molasses making time in the South and I found “Uncle Jim” busily engaged in superintending the process of cooking the extracted juice from a large quantity of sorghum cane. The familiar type of horse-power mill in which the cane is crushed was in full operation, a roaring fire was blazing in the crudely constructed furnace beneath the long pan that contained the furiously foaming, boiling juice and that “Uncle Jim” informed me was “nigh ’bout done” and ready to drain off into the huge black pot that stood by the side of the furnace. The purpose of my visit was explained and “Uncle Jim” leaving the molasses making to some younger Negro accompanied me to the shade of a large oak tree that stood near-by and told me the following story:
“My ole mars, he was name Tom White and my young mars what claimed me, he was name Jeff. Young mars an’ me was just ’bout same age. Us played together from time I fust riccolect till us left de ole home place back in Alabama and lit out for over here in Arkansas.
“Ole mars, he owned a heap of niggers back dere where us all lived on de big place but de lan’, it was gittin’ poor an’ red and mought near wore out; so ole mars, he ’quired a big lot of lan’ here in Arkansas in Phillips County, but you know it was all in de woods den ’bout fifteen miles down de ribber from Helena and just thick wid canebrakes. So he sont ’bout twenty famblies ober here end dats how us happened to come ’cause my pappy, he was a extra blacksmith and carpenter and ole mars knowed he gwine to haf to hab him to ’sist in buildin’ de houses and sich like.
“Though I was just ’bout seben year ole den, howsomeever, I ’member it well an’ I sure did hate to leave de ole home where I was borned and I didn’ want leave Mars Jeff either and when Mars Jeff foun’ it out ’bout ’em gwine take me he cut up awful and just went on, sayin’ I his nigger and wasn’t gwine ’way off to Arkansas.