"My father never was a sharecropper. He knew nothing of rural work except the mechanical side of it. He could make or do anything that was needed in fixing up something to do farm work with. I have seen him make and sharpen plows. The first cotton stalk cutter that was made within ten miles of here was made by my father. The people 'round here were knocking off cotton stalks with sticks until my father began making the cutter. Then everybody began using his cutter. That is, the different farmers and sharecroppers around here began using them. I was scared of the first one he made. He made six saws or knives and sharpened them and put them on a section of a log so that it could be hitched to a mule and pulled through the fields and cut the cotton stalks down.
"My mother's old master was her father. I think my father's father was a Negro and his mother was an Indian. My mother's mother was an American woman, that is, a slavery woman. My mother and father were lucky in having good people. My mother was treated just like one of her master's other children. My father's master had an overseer but he never was allowed to touch my father. Of course my mother never was under an overseer."
FOOTNOTES:
[G] [HW: Central Tennessee College estab. about 1866-7.]
Interviewer: Miss Irene Robertson
Person interviewed: Angeline Jones
Near Biscoe and Brinkley, Arkansas
Age: 79
[Date Stamp: May 31 1938]
"I was born in Memphis, Tennessee. Mother was cooking. Her name was Marilla Harris and she took my pa's name, Brown. He was Francis Brown. I was three years old when the surrender come on. Then grandma, my mama and pa and me and my brother come with a family to Biscoe. There wasn't no Biscoe but that's where we come to anyhow. Mama and grandma cooked for a woman. They bought a big farm and started clearing. Some of it was cleared. Mama's been dead forty years. I farmed all my whole life. I don't know nothing else.
"Grandma had a right smart to say during slavery times. She was cooking for her mistress and had a family. She'd hide good things to take to her children. The mistress kept a polly parrot about in the kitchen. Polly would tell on grandma. Caused grandma to get whoopings. She talked like a good many of 'em. She got sick. The woman what married grandma's brother was to take her place. She wasn't going to be getting no whoopings. She sewed the parrot up. He got to dwindling. They doctored him. She clipped his tongue at the same time so he never could do no good talking. He died. They never found out his trouble. Grandma said they worried about the parrot but she never did; she knowed what been done. Grandma come from Paris, Tennessee but I think the same folks fetched 'er. I don't think she said she was sold. She said slavery times was hard. Mama didn't see as hard times as grandma had. Grandma shielded her in the work part a whole heap to get to live where she did. They loved to be together. She's been dead and left me forty odd years. I works and support myself, and my kin folks help all they can."