given to
her. In this was supposed to be the papers regarding De Soto's legendary
gold mine. The trunk had been lost as Uncle Bob has no idea where the
gold mine is. He tells the story the same way, never varying a point. He
does not claim to remember Indian trails or names.

Uncle Bob is tall and straight. He is blind. Was clean in appearance
dressed in slightly faded overalls. He has a short, clean grey beard. He
talks with a clear accent, no Negro accent. During Reconstruction days
he served as County Clerk of Hempstead County under Carpetbaggar rule.
During those days he was a political power to be reckoned with. He was
a national as well as a state figure in the "Lily White Republican"
organization. [His wife was a Negro, good looking, but showed little
trace of much white blood.]

Interviewer: Mary D. Hudgins
Person Interviewed: Emma Sanderson
Home: 617 Wade Street, Hot Springs.
Aged: 75

"Emma Sanderson"--"Wade Street". That was all the prospective
interviewer could learn. "Emma Sanderson--ex-slave!" "Wade Street"--"Why
it's way off that way. You go sort of thatta way, and then thatta way."

A city map disclosed no Wade Street. Maps belonging to a local
abstractor helped not a whit. "Insurance maps are in more detail."
someone advised, "Wade Street," mused the young woman at the desk, "I've
heard of it. We have written a policy for someone there." The head of
the department was new to the city, but he was eager to help. After
about five minutes search--from wall maps to bound volumes of blocks
and back again it appeared that "Wade Street" more frequently known as
"Washington Street" meanders wanderingly from Silver Street, in the
colored section out to the "Gorge addition" inhabited by low economic
level whites.

Down Malvern Avenue (Hot springs' Beale Street) went the interviewer. On
she went past the offices of a large Chicago packing house. For better
then a block she trudged by dilapidated shops which a few seasons back
had housed one of the key transient centers of the U.S.A. Down the
street she walked, pausing for a moment to note that coffee colored
faces decorated the placards in the beauty shop window--two well groomed
mulatto girls sitting inside, evidently operators. Her course took her
past sandwich joints and pool halls. Nails, she noted as she drifted
along, had been driven into the projection beneath the plate glass
window of the brick bank (closed during the depression--a building a