"I'll tell you my opinions some other time. I think the young people are
beyond control. I don't have any trouble with mine. I never have had any
trouble with them."
Interviewer: Samuel S. Taylor
Person interviewed: Eliza Hays
2215 W. Twentieth Street, Little Rock, Arkansas
Age: 77 or more
"On the fourth of August, my birthday, and directly after the colored
people were set free, all the white people gave a great big dinner to
the slaves. All the white people at my home came together and gave a big
dinner to us. It was that way all over the United States. My mother told
me I was four years old at that big dinner. They went to a great big
book and throwed it open and found my birthday in it. I never will
forget that. You can figure from that exactly how old I am.
(Seventy-seven or seventy-eight--ed.)
"My mother's name was Elizabeth Tuggle and my father's name was Albert
Tuggle. My mother was the mother of sixteen children. They were some of
them born in freedom and some born in slavery. They are all dead but
three. My mother was married twice.
"Old Tom Owens was my mother's master. I just do remember him. My
father's master was named Tom Tuggle. My mother and my father got
together by going different places and meeting. They went together till
freedom and weren't married except in the way they married in slavery.
During slavery times, old master gave you to some one and that was all
of it. My father asked my mother's old master if he could go with my
mother and old man Owens said yes. Then father went to her cabin to see
her. When freedom came, he taken her to his place and married her
accordin' to the law.
"Aunt Mariny Tuggle was my father's mother. I don't know anything about
his father. She has been dead! She died when I was young. I can remember
her well, though.
"I can remember my mother's mother. Her name was Eliza Whitelow. Her
husband was named Jack Whitelow. They was my grandfather and my
grandmother on my mother's side. They old people. I can remember seeing
them.
"I never saw my grandfather on my father's side. That was way back in
slavery time. I used to hear them say he was a guinea man. He was short.
My own father was small too. But my father's father was short as I am. I
am about four and a half feet tall. (I stopped here and measured her,
and she was exactly four feet six inches tall--ed.) I never heard nobody
say where he came from. My father's sisters were part Indian. Their hair
was longer than that ruler you got in your hand there. It came down on
their shoulders. They was a shade brighter than I am.
"My father's mother was small too. His sisters were not whole sisters;
their daddy was Indian."