smart. I tell you one thing--I like all of it."

Interviewer: Samuel S. Taylor
Person interviewed: J.L. Smith
1215 Pulaski Street, Little Rock, Arkansas
Age: 76

"I was born in 1862 in the month of September on the fifteenth. I
was born at a place they call Indian Bay on White River down here
in Arkansas. My mother was named Emmaline Smith and she was born in
Tennessee. I don't know really now what county or what part of the
state. My father's name was John Smith. He was born in North Carolina.
I don't know nothing about what my grandfather's name and grandmother's
names were. I never saw them. None of my folks are old aged as I am. My
father was sixty years old when he died and my mother was only younger
than that.

Experience of Father

"I heard my father say that he helped get out juniper timber in North
Carolina. The white man me and my sister worked with after my father
died was the man my father worked with in the juniper swamp. His name
was Alfred Perry White. As long as he lived, we could do work for him.
We didn't live on his place but we worked for him by the day. He is dead
now--died way back yonder in the seventies. There was the Brooks and
Baxter trouble in 1874, and my father died in seventy-five. White lived
a little while longer.

"My father was married twice before he married my mother. He had two
sets of children. I don't know how many of them there were. He had
four children by my mother. He had only four children as far as I can
remember.

"I don't know how my father and my mother met up. They lived in the same
plantation and in the same house. They were owned by the same man when
freedom came. I don't know how they got together. I have often wondered
about that. One from Tennessee and the other from North Carolina, but
they got together. I guess that they must have been born in different
places and brought together through being bought and sold.

"My mother was a Murrill. My father was a Cartwright. My father's
brother Lewis was a man who didn't take nothing much from anybody, and
he 'specially didn't like to take a whipping. When Lewis' master wanted
to whip him, he would call his mother--the master's mother--and have her
whip him, because he figured Uncle Lewis wouldn't hit a woman.

"I have six children altogether. Two of them are dead. There are three
girls and one boy living. The oldest is fifty-seven; the next, fifty;
and the youngest, forty-eight. The