“After we come to Arkansas I never got to see my sister. My husband was a good scholar. He could write. He wrote and wrote back to find my sister and mother but they never answered my letters. I asked everybody that come from there about my sisters and mother but never have heard a word. I slept on a pallet on the floor nearly all my life. I had a little bed at Mr. Henderson’s.
“I didn’t know it was freedom till one day when I was about fourteen or fifteen years old—judging from my size and what I done. I went off to a spring to wash. I had one pot of clothes to boil and another just out of the pot to rub and rinse. A girl come to tell me Mrs. Field had company and wanted me to come cook dinner. I didn’t go but I told her I would be on and cook dinner soon as I could turn loose the washing. There was two colored girls and a white girl could done the cooking but I was a good cook. The girl put on the water for me to scald the chickens soon as she went to the house. When I got there Mrs. Field Mathis had a handful of switches corded together to beat me. I picked up the pan of boiling water to scald the chickens in. She got scared of me, told me to put the pan down. I didn’t do it. I didn’t aim to hurt her. I wouldn’t throwed that boiling water on nothing. She sent to the store for her husband. He come and I told him how it was about the clothes and three girls there could cook without me. He got mad at her and said: ‘Mary Agnes, she is as free as you are or I am. I’m not going to ever hurt her again and you better not.’ That is the first I ever heard about freedom. It had been freedom a long time. I don’t know how long then.
“I stayed on, washed out the clothes and strung them up that evening. I ironed all the clothes and cooked the rest of the week. Mr. Field got me a good home with some colored folks. He told me if I would go there he never would let nobody bother me and he never would mistreat me no more. I worked some for them but they paid me. She ought to thought a heap of me the way I cooked and worked for her. That was my freedom. I was sold on a platform to Mr. Mathis.
“After freedom I done field work. I never seen a Ku Klux in my life. I cooked out some and I married. I still cooked out. I was married once and married in a church. I have seven children living and seven dead.
“I live with my daughter and her family and I get $6 and commodities. I’m mighty thankful for that. It helps me a whole lots.
“I recken young folks do the best they know to do. Seems like folks are kinder hearted than they used to be. Times have changed a heap every way. Times is harder for poor folks than the others. It is a true saying that poor folks have hard ways and rich folks have mean ways. They are more selfish. I always had to work hard. Both times I was sold for $100.”
Interviewer: Miss Irene Robertson
Persons interviewed: William and Charlotte Guess
West Memphis, Arkansas
Ages: 68 and 66
William Guess
“I was born in Monroe County, Arkansas. Father come from Dallas, Texas when a young man before he married. Him and two other men was shipped in a box to Indian Bay. I’ve heard him and Ike Jimmerson laugh how they got bumped and bruised, hungry and thirsty in the box. I forgot the name of the other man in the box. They was sent on a boat and changed boats where they got tumbled up so bad. It was in slavery or war times one. White folks nailed them up and opened them up too I think. Father was born in Dallas, Texas. Mother was a small woman and come from Tennessee. Billy Boyce in Monroe County owned her. That is the most I ever heard my folks tell about the Civil War.”