"My folks never spoke of being nothing but field hands. Folks used to be proud of their crops, go look over them on Sunday when company come. Now if they got a garden they hide it and don't mention it. Times is changed that way.
"Clothes ain't as lasty as they used to be. People has a heap more money to spend and don't raise and have much at home as they did when I was a child. Times is all turned around and folks too. I always had plenty till I couldn't do hard work. I farmed my early life. We didn't have much money but we had rations and warm clothes. I cleared new ground, hauled wood, big logs. I steamboated on the Sun, Kate Adams, and One Arm John. I helped with the freight. I railroaded with pick and shovel and in the lead mines. I worked from Memphis to Helena on boats a good while. I come back here to farm. Time is changed and I'm changed.
"It has been so long since I heard my parents tell about slavery I couldn't tell you straight. She told till she died, talked about how the Yankees done when they come through. They took axes and busted up good furniture. They et up and wasted the rations, then humor up the black folks like they was in their favor when they was settin' out wasting their living. They done made it to live on. Some followed them and some stayed on. They wanted freedom but it wasn't like they thought it would be. They didn't know how it would be. They didn't know it meant set out. Seem like they left. In some ways times was better and some ways it was worse. They had to work or starve is what they told me. That's the way I found freedom. 'Course their owners made them work and he looked out for the ration and in slavery.
"I keeps up my own self all I can. I don't get help."
Interviewer: Mrs. Bernice Bowden
Person interviewed: Iran Nelson
603 E. Fourteenth Ave., Pine Bluff, Ark.
Age: 77
"Yes ma'm, they fotch me from Mississippi to Arkansas on the steamboat—you know they didn't have railroads then. They fotch my mother and they went back after grandfather and grandmother too.
"Dr. Noell was our master and he had us under mortgage to his brother-in-law. They fotched us here till he could get straight from that debt, but fore that could be, we got free.
"I knowed slavery times. I member seem' em lash some of the rest but you know I wasn't big enough to put in the fields. Old mistress say when I got big enough, she goin' take me for a house girl. When they fotched mama and grandmother here they had eighty some odd head of niggers. They was gwine carry em back home after they got that mortgage paid but the war come.