“I remember once in North Carolina a man named Bryant got away with a lot of votes in the boxes. He was seen to go out with two boxes under his arms. And when they counted up the votes, the Democrats was ahead. In them days, they counted up the votes before they left the polls. They wanted to kill him. They sent him to the penitentiary to stay five years. When he went in he was a young man, and when he came back he was gray.

“There was some fighting down there that night. My father was a constable. It was the white folks got to fighting each other. They got to ’resting them and they filled the calaboose full that night. Didn’t have but one jail and that was in Halifax. The penitentiary was in Raleigh. Raleigh was about 85 miles from Halifax, and Halifax about 75 from Enfield. The jail was twelve miles from Enfield.”

Mulattoes

“There were mixed bloods then just like there are now. Them came by the old master, you know. They treated the mulatto a little better than they did the other slaves. You know you would have more respect for your own blood. My Aunt Rena was half-sister to my father. They had the same mother but different fathers and they always gave her a little better treatment than they give him. They didn’t sell her. When slavery broke she was still with her master, Old Tom Hollis. The old lady (her mother) was there too. They hadn’t sold her neither. But they never give none of them nothin’ when they was freed.

“My father was a field hand at first. But after he went to war and come back with the scrofula, they just made him a carriage driver. But he wasn’t no mulatto though.”

Interviewer: Miss Irene Robertson
Person interviewed: William Hunter, Brinkley, Arkansas
Age: 70

“John McBride was my mother’s last owner. His wife died in slavery. I never heard her name called. My mother come from Abbeville, South Carolina, a Negro trading point. When she was put on the block my father went to McBride and asked him to buy that woman for him a wife. He said she was a mighty pretty young woman. McBride bought her. I don’t know how they got to Carroll County, Mississippi but that is where I was born. My mother raised Walter and Johnny McBride (white). She nursed one of them along with my brother May—May McBride was his name. That was at Asme, Alabama before I was born. I heard my mother say she never worked in the field but two years in her whole life. It must have been just after the war, for I have seen a ditch she and another woman cut. When they cut it, it was 4 ft. × 4 ft. I don’t know the length. When I seed it, it was a creek 100 ft. wide. I don’t know how deep. I recollect hearing my father talk about clearing land before freedom but I don’t know if he was in Alabama or Mississippi then.

“My mother was mixed with the white race. She was a bright woman. My father was a real dark man. He was a South Carolina gutchen—soft water folks, get mad and can’t talk. He was crazy about yellow folks.

“McBride died fifty-one years ago. When I was a boy he carried me with him—right in the buggy or oxcart with him till I was up nineteen years old. He went to the saloon to get a dram. I got one too. When he went to a big hotel to eat something he sent out the kitchen door to me out to our buggy or wagon. We camped sometimes when we went to town. It took so long to go over the roads.