Talitha: “Course I wasn’t old enough to know anything ’bout hit but I heard my mother say it got so smoky the chickens didn’t get off the roost while they was bustin’ all them big cannons.”
Jack: “All us chillun was just as fat and healthy as hogs. Warn’t never sick. They’d feed ’bout this time every evening (4 p.m.) and by sundown I was in bed. My mother worked in the field and I’ve heard her say that sometime she didn’t see her chillun from Sunday to Sunday. Old lady Hannah Banks done the cooking for everybody and she cooked on a big fireplace. They didn’t have no stove. Why, I got here before the stoves did. Ma and pa and all the grown ones would get up at four o’clock and eat breakfast and be in the field workin’ by sunup. They had a box with shelves drove up on the side of the wall to the cabin where we slept and old lady Hannah Banks would put our breakfast in that and when we woke up we would get it and eat. One morning I woke up before the other chillun did and ’cided I’d git my breakfast first ’fore they did. I clem up, rech up and got holt of that box and I was so heavy I pulled it down and broke all the old blue edge plates. That woke the other chillun up all right, and I can jes see them old blue edge plates now. For dinner they would give us boiled greens or beans wid bread and for supper they would save the slop (liquor), cram it full of bread, pour it in a tray and give it to all the chilluns and me, sister Julia, Nancy, Lizzie, Marthy, and all the little nigger chillun.”
Talitha: “Huh! Old man Givens had so many little nigger chillun couldn’ feed ’em in no tray. Had to have troughs. They’d take a log and hollow it out and make three tubs in a row and put peg legs on it and a hole in the bottom of each one with a pin in it. They would use these tubs to wash the clothes in and pull the stem up to let all the water run out, clean ’em out real good, fill with bread and pot-licker or bread and milk, and feed the nigger chillun.”
Jack: “You say our nephew wants to come out and bring a bunch of young folks and wants me to take them ’possum hunting some moonlight night? Sho, sho, I’ll go.”
Talitha: “I don’t know how he’d go lessen we totes him. Why, he got the rheumatism so bad he can’t hardly git ’round in the daytime much less at night. Why, the other day he was out in the field follerin’ the boy that was plowin’ up the potatoes and we was goin’ on pickin’ them up. First thing I know I hear somethin’ behind me go ‘plop’ and I looked roun and there lay Jack jes stretched out. Fell down over his own feet. So what would he do out nights? And you sees that knot on his ankle. Hit was broke when he was a boy an’ hit still gives him trouble when his rheumatism starts up.”
Jack: “You say how did I do it? I was jumpin’. A bunch of us boys was jumpin’ ’cross a ditch jes to see how far we could jump. I was a young chap ’bout seventeen or eighteen then. I was doin’ purty well with my jumpin’ when I made a misjump an’ jumped crooked and hit my ankle on a big old iron rock. My but hit hurt bad. I didn’ do no more jumpin’ that day. The next day I was down in the woods getting a load of lider. Had put on a few pieces on the wagon when I started to turn aroun and down I went. I jes lay there and hollered till someone come an’ got me. That was in the winter just before Christmas and I didn’t get out no more till in the spring. The woods looked right purty to me when I got out. The leaves was great big. And that ain’t all, I ain’t jumped no more since. ’Sides that I ain’t never been sick to ’mount to anything. Had the whooping cough at the same time that Joe and Tom Snyder had hit. Still got my natchel teeth, lost four up here and got one that bothers me some, ’sides that I have ’em all. Yas suh, that the schoolhouse ’cross the road there. We has preachin’ there sometimes too. Does Ab preach there? He, he, he! sometime he do. Did I ever tell you ’bout the time Ab was preaching out here at ____ and got to stampin’ roun wid that peg-leg of his’n an’ hit went through the rotten floor and we had to pull him out? He, he, he!”
Talitha: “Now, Jack Island, you knows that is jes ’nother one uv yo tales. I is been to hear Ab preach lots of times and he does storm roun mighty bad and I ain’t got no faith in his religion tall but I warn’t there when he fell through the floo’.”
Interviewer: Pernella M. Anderson
Person interviewed: Mary Island
626 Nelson Street, El Dorado, Arkansas
Age: 80
“I was born in Union Parish, Louisiana in the year of 1857, so the white folks told me, and I am eighty years old. My mama died when I was two years old and my aunty raised me. She started me out washing dishes when I was four years old and when I was six she was learning me how to cook. While the other hands was working in the field I carried water. We had to cook out in the yard on an old skillet and lid, so you see I had to tote brush and bark and roll up little logs such as I could to keep the fire from one time of cooking to the other. I was not but six years old either. When I got to be seven years old I was cutting sprouts almost like a man and when I was eight I could pick one hundred pounds of cotton. When it rained and we could not go to the field my aunty had me spinning thread to make socks and cloth, then I had to card the bats and make the rolls to spin.