really true but hair-raising. Then she
would talk and live again the "days that are no more", telling them of
the happy prosperous, sunny land, in her negro dialect, and then tell of
the ruin and desolation behind the Yankees; the hard times my white
folks had in the reconstruction days--negro and carpetbag rule; then
give them glimpses of good--much courage, some heart and human feeling;
perhaps ending with an outburst of the negro spiritual, her favorite
being, "Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home."

After a faithful service of 106 years, Emiline died in 1932 at the home
of Mrs. John G. High, a great-granddaughter of L.W.C. Waddell living
nine miles north of Lonoke, and the grown up great-great-grandchildren
still miss Mammy.

Interviewer: Samuel S. Taylor
Person interviewed: Henry Waldon
816 Walnut Street. North Little Rock, Arkansas
Age: 84

"I was plowing when they surrendered. I had just learned to plow, and
was putting up some land. My young master come home and was telling me
the War was ended and we was all free.

"I was born in Lauderdale County, Mississippi. I think it was about
1854. My father's name [HW: was] ----, my mother's [HW: was] ----, I
knew them both.

"My mother belonged to Sterling and my father belonged to a man named
Huff--Richmond Huff.

"We lived in Lauderdale County. Huff wouldn't sell my father and my
people wouldn't sell my mother. They lived about a mile or so apart.
They didn't marry in them days. The niggers didn't, that is. Father
would just come every Saturday night to see my mother. His cabin was
about three miles from her's. We moved from Lauderdale County to Scott
County, Mississippi, and that separated mama and papa. They never did
meet again. Of course, I mean it was the white people that moved, but
they carried mama and us with them. Papa and mama never did meet again
before freedom, and they didn't meet afterwards.

"My mother had twelve children--eight girls and four boys. She had one
by a man named Peter Smith. She was away from her husband then. She had
four by my father--two boys and two girls; my father's name was Peter
Huff. My mother's name was Mary Sterling. I never did see my father no
more after we moved away from him.

"My father made cotton and corn, plowed and hoed in slavery time. His
old master had seventy-five or eighty hands. His old master treated him
pretty rough. He whipped them about working. He neve