"That's what my mother told me. I can remember a long ways back myself.
After the war, it wasn't long before they began to open up schools. They
used to run school three or four months a year. Both white and colored
in the country had about three or four months. That is all they had.
There weren't so very many white folks that took an interest in
education during slave time. Colored people got just about as much as
they did right after the war. What time we went to school we went the
whole day. We would come home and work in the evening like. We had
pretty fair teachers. All white then at first. They didn't have no
colored till afterwards. If they did, they had so few, I never heard of
them.
"The first teacher I had was Katie Whitefold (white). That was in
Waterloo. Miss Richardson was our next teacher. She was white too. We
went to school two terms under white women. After that we began to get
teachers from Columbia, South Carolina, where the normal school was.
"The white teachers who taught us were people who had been raised right
around Waterloo. We never had no Northern teachers as I knows of. Our
first colored teacher was Murry Evans. He a preacher. He was one of our
leading preachers too. After him our colored women began to come in and
stand examination wasn't so hard at that time, but they made a good
showing. There were good scholars.
"I went to school too much. I went to school at Philander Smith College
some, too. I went a good piece in school. Come pretty near finishing the
English course (high school). I finished Good[HW: sp.?] Brown's 'Grammer
of Grammers'. Professor Backensto (the spelling is the interviewer's)
sent away and got it and sold it to us. We was his students. He was a
white man from the North and a good scholar. We got in those grammars
and got the same lessons they give him when he was in school--nine pages
a lesson and we had to repeat that lesson three times. When my mother
died, I was off in the normal school.
"Right after the war, my parents farmed. He followed his trade. That
always gave us something to eat you know. When we farmed, we
sharecropped--a third and a fourth--that is, we got a third of the
cotton and a fourth of the corn. Potatoes and things like that went
free. All women got an acre free. My mother always got an acre and she
worked it good too. She always had her bale of cotton. And if she didn't
have a bale, she laid it next to the white folks' and made it out. They
knew it and they didn't care. She stood well with the white people.
Helped all of 'em raise their children, and they all liked that.
"I went along with my father whenever he had a big job and needed help.
I got to be as good a carpenter as he was.
"I married out here. About eighty-five. People were emigrating to this
country. There was a boom to emigrating then. Emigrating was a little
dangerous when a man was trying to get hands. White folks would lay
traps and kill men that were taking away their hands--they would kill
white just as quick as they would black. I started out under a white
man--I can't remember his name. He turned me over to Madden, a colored
man who was raised in Waterloo. We came from there to Greenwood, South
Carolina where everything was straight. After that we had nothing to do
but get on the train and keep coming. We was with our agent then and we
had no more trouble after that.
"I got off at Brinkley over at Minor Gregory's farm. He needed hands
then and was glad to get us. He is dead now. I stayed in Brinkley the
space of about a year. Then he gave us transportation to Little Rock.
The train came from Memphis, and we struck out for Little Rock. I
married after I come to Little Rock. I forget what year. But anyway my
wife is dead and gone and all the children. So I'm single now.