“I used to be a regular miller until they laid the men off. Now I don’t have no kind of job at all.”
Right after the War
“Some of the slaves went right up North. We stayed in Clarksville and worked there for a year or two. In 1864, we went to Warren County, Illinois. They put me in school. My people were just common laborers. They bought themselves a nice little home.
“My mother’s name was Anna Bailis and my father’s name was Charles Morrill. I don’t remember the names of their masters.
“I was raised by my uncle, Simon Blair. His master used to be a Bailis. My father, so I was told, went off and left my mother. She was weak and ailing, so my uncle took me. He took me away from her and carried me up North with them. My father ran away before the slaves were freed. I never found out what became of him.
“I stayed in Illinois from the time I was five or six years old up until I was twenty-one. I left there in 1880. That is about the time when Garfield ran for President. I was in Ohio, seen him before he was assassinated in 1882. Garfield and Arthur ran against Hancock and English. They beat ’em too.”
Little Rock
“I used to go from place to place working first one place and then another—going down the Mississippi on boats. Monmouth, Illinois, where I was raised—they ain’t nothing to that place. Just a dry little town!”
Opinions
“The young people nowadays are all right. There is not so much ignorance now as there was in those days. There was ignorance all over then. The Peckerwoods wasn’t much wise either. They know nowadays though. Our race has done well in refinement.