“I’m lookin’ for a better time. God’s got His time set for ’em on that.
“I belong to St. James Methodist Episcopal Church.”
#737
Interviewer: Samuel S. Taylor
Person interviewed: Marie E. Hervey
1520 Pulaski Street, Little Rock, Arkansas
Age: 62
“I have heard my father and mother talk over the War so many times. They would talk about how the white people would do the colored and how the Yankees would come in and tear up everything and take anything they could get their hands on. They would tell how the colored people would soon be free. My mama’s white folks went out and hid when the Yankees were coming through.
“My father’s white people were named Taylor’s—old Job Taylor’s folks. They lived in Tennessee.
“My mother said they had a block to put the colored people and their children on and they would tell them to tell people what they could do when the people asked them. It would just be a lot of lies. And some of them wouldn’t do it. One or two of the colored folks they would sell and they would carry the others back. When they got them back they would lock them up and they would have the overseers beat them, and bruise them, and knock them ’round and say, ‘Yes, you can’t talk, huh? You can’t tell people what you can do?’ But they got a beating for lying, and they would uh got one if they hadn’t lied, most likely.
“They used to take pregnant women and dig a hole in the ground and put their stomachs in it and whip them. They tried to do my grandma that way, but my grandpa got an ax and told them that if they did he would kill them.
“They never could do anything with him.