"I don't know how old I am. I was born before the war. My father went to the war when it begun. I had another brother that was born before the war. He don't remember nothin' about my father. I don't neither. I was too young."
Interviewer's Comment
Allowing for a year's difference between the two youngest children, and allowing that the boy was born immediately before the War, the girl could not be younger than seventy-eight. She could be older. She states all facts as through her mother, but she seems to have experienced some of the things she relates. Her memory is fading. Failure to get pension or old age assistance oppresses her mind. She comes back to it again and again. She carries her card and her commodity order with her in her pocketbook.
She had asked me to write some letters for her when her daughter interfered and said that she didn't want it done. She said that she had told the case worker that her husband worked at the Missouri Pacific Shop and that the case worker had asked her if she wouldn't provide for her mother. They live in a neat rented house. The mother weighs about a hundred and ten pounds and is tall. The daughter is about the same height but weighs about two hundred and fifty. Time and again, the old lady tried to convey to me a message that she didn't want her daughter to hear, but I could not make it out. The daughter was belligerent, as is sometimes the case, and it was only by walking in the very middle of the straight and narrow path that I managed to get my story.
Interviewer: Samuel S. Taylor
Person interviewed: Austin Pen Parnell
4314 W. Seventeenth Street, Little Rock, Arkansas
Age: 73
Occupation: Carpenter
Birth and General Fact About Life
"I was born April fifteenth, 1865, the day Lincoln was assassinated, in Carroll County, Mississippi, about ten miles from Grenada. It's about half the distance between Grenada and Carrollton. Carrollton is our county seat but we went to Grenada more than we went to Carrollton.
"When I got older, I moved to Grenada and I come from there here. I was about thirty-five years old when I moved to Grenada. About 160 acres of land in Grenada was mine. I bought it, but heirs claimed the place and I had to leave. I had no land then, only a lot here and I came over here to look it over. A lady had come to Mississippi selling property and she had a plat which she said was in Little Rock not far from the capitol. Her name was Mrs. Putman. The place was on the other side of the Fourche. But I didn't know that until I came here. She misguided me. I came to Arkansas and looked at the lot and didn't want it. I made a trip over here twice before I settled on living in Little Rock. I told the others who had bought property from her the truth about its location. They asked me and I hate to lie. I didn't knock; I just answered questions and didn't volunteer nothing. They all quit making their payments, Just like I did. My land had a rock on it as big as a bale of cotton.