Interviewer: Samuel S. Taylor
Person interviewed: Mary Jones
1017 Dennison, Little Rock, Arkansas
Age: 72

"I was born on the twenty-second of March, 1866, in Van Buren, Arkansas. I had six children. All of them were bred and born at the same place.

"I was born in a frame house. My father used to live in the country, but I was born in the town. He bought it just as soon as he come out of the army and married right away and bought this home. I don't know where he got his money from. I guess he saved it. He served in the Union army; he wasn't a servant. He was a soldier, and drawed his pay. He never run through his money like most people do. I don't know whether he made any money in slavery or not but he was a carpenter during slave times and they say he always had plenty of money. I guess he had saved some of that too.

"My mother was married twice. Her name was Louisa Buchanan. My father was named Abraham Riley. My stepfather was named Moses Buchanan. My father was a soldier in the old original war (the Civil War)—the war they ended in 1865.

"I disremember who my mother's master was but I think it was a man named Johnson. I didn't know my father's people. She married him from White County up here. Her and him, they corresponded mostly in letters because he traveled lots. He looked like an Indian. He had straight hair and was tall and rawboned and wore a Texas hat. I had his picture but the pictures fade away. My father was a sergeant. He died sometime after the war. I don't remember when because I wasn't old enough. I can just remember looking at the corpse. I was too small to do any grieving.

"My mother was a nurse in slavery times. She nursed the white folks and their children. She did the housework and such like. She was a good cook too. After freedom, when the old folks died out, she cooked for Zeb Ward—you know him, head of the penitentiary. She used to cook for the Jews and gentiles. That her kind of work. That was her occupation—good cook. She could make all kinds of provisions. She could make preserves and they had a big orchard everywhere she worked.

"I have heard my mother talk about pateroles, jayhawkers, and Ku Klux, but I never knew of them myself. I have heard say they were awful bad—the Ku Klux or somethin'.

"My mother's white folks sold her. I don't know who they sold her to or from. They sold her from her mother. I don't know how she got free. I think she got free after the war ceased. But she had a good time all her life. She had a good time because she was a good cook, and a good nurse, and she had good white folks. My grandma, she had good folks too. They was free before they were free, my ma and grandma. They was just as free before freedom as they were afterwards. My mother had seven children and two sets of twins among them. But I am the only one living.