"The pateroles used to drive and whip them. They would catch the slaves off without a pass and whip them and then make the boss pay for them when they took them back. I never seen the pateroles but I have seen the Ku Klux and they were the same thing.
"The jayhawkers would catch you when the pateroles didn't. They would carry you to the pateroles and get pay for you, and the pateroles would turn you over to the owners. You had to have a pass. If you didn't the pateroles would catch you and wear you out, keep you till the next morning, and then send you home by the jayhawkers. They didn't call them that though, they called them bushwhackers.
"The Ku Klux came after the War. They was the same thing as the pateroles—they come out from them. I know where the Ku Klux home is over here on Eighteenth and Broadway. That is where they broke up. It ain't never been open since. (Not correct—ed.)
"I saw the Yankees come in the yard on the Webb place. That was in the time of the War. The old man got on his horse and flew. The Yankees went in the smokehouse, broke it open, got all the meat they wanted. They didn't pay you nothing in slavery time. But what meat the Yankees didn't take for themselves, they give to the niggers.
"My folks never got anything for their work that I know of. I heard my mother say that nobody got paid for their work. I don't know whether they had a chance to make anything on the side or not.
"The Yankees, when they come in the yard that morning, told my father he was free. I remember that myself. They come up riding horses and carryin' long old guns with bayonets on them, and told him. They rode all over the country from one place to another telling the niggers they were free. Master didn't get a chance to tell us because he left when he saw them comin'.
"When my mother and father were living on the plantation, they lived in an old frame building. A portion of it was log. My father stayed with the Calverts—his wife's white folks. At first old man Webb sold him to them; then he bought him back and bought my mother too. They were together when freedom came. You know they auctioned you off in slavery time. Every year, they would, they put you up on the auction block and buy and sell. That was down in Georgia. We was in Georgia when we was freed—in Atlanta. My father and mother had fourteen children altogether. My mother died the year after we came out here. That would be about 1875. I never had but three children because my wife died early. Two of them are dead.
"Right after freedom, my father plaited baskets and mats. He shucked mops, put handles on rakes and did things like that in addition to his farming. He was a blacksmith all the time too. He used to plait collars for mules. He farmed and got his harvests in season. The other things would be a help to him between times.
"My father came here because he thought that there was a better situation here than in Georgia. Of course, the living was better there because they had plenty of fruit. Then he worked on a third and fourth. He got one bale of cotton out of every three he made. The slaves left many a plantation and they would grow up in weeds. When a man would clear up the ground like this and plant it down in something, he would get all he planted on it. That was in addition to the ground that he would contract to plant. He used to plant rice, peas, potatoes, corn, and anything else he wanted too. It was all his'n so long as it was on extra ground he cleared up.
"But they said, 'Cotton grows as high as a man in Arkansas.' Then they paid a man two dollars fifty cents for picking cotton here in Arkansas while they just paid about forty cents in Georgia. So my father came here. Times was good when we come here. The old man cleared five bales of cotton for himself his first year, and he raised his own corn. He bought a pony and a cow and a breeding hog out of the first year's money. He died about thirty-five years ago.