ide. I don't know how deep. I recollect
hearing my father talk about clearing land before freedom but I don't
know if he was in Alabama or Mississippi then.

"My mother was mixed with the white race. She was a bright woman. My
father was a real dark man. He was a South Carolina gutchen--soft water
folks, get mad and can't talk. He was crazy about yellow folks.

"McBride died fifty-one years ago. When I was a boy he carried me with
him--right in the buggy or oxcart with him till I was up nineteen years
old. He went to the saloon to get a dram. I got one too. When he went
to a big hotel to eat something he sent out the kitchen door to me out
to our buggy or wagon. We camped sometimes when we went to town. It took
so long to go over the roads.

"When freedom was declared McBride called up all his slaves and told em
they was free; they could go or stay on. My father moved off two years
after freedom and then he moved back and we stayed till the old man
died. Then my father went to Varden, Mississippi and worked peoples
gardens. He was old then too.

"I never seen a 'white cap' (Ku Klux). I heard a heap of talk about em.
The people in Mississippi had respect for colored worship.

"I farmed till we went to Varden, Mississippi. I started working on the
section. I was brakeman on the train out from Water Valley. Then I come
to Wheatley, Arkansas. I worked on the section. All told, I worked forty
years on the section. I worked on a log wagon, with a tire company, at
the oil mill and in the cotton mill. I had a home till it went in the
Home Loan. I have to pay $2.70 a month payments. I get commodities, no
money, from the Welfare. My wife is dead now."

MAY 11 1938
Interviewer: Samuel S. Taylor
Person interviewed: Ida Blackshear Hutchinson
2620 Orange Street, North Little Rock, Arkansas
Age: 73

Birth

"I was born in 1865 in Alabama in Sumter County on Sam Scale's place
near the little town called Brushville (?)." [HW: Bushville or
Brushville(?)]

Parents and Grandparents

"My father's name was Isom Blackshear. Some people call it Blackshire,
but we call it Blackshear. His master was named Uriah Blackshear. I have
heard him say so many times the year he was born. He died (Isom) in 1905
and was in his eighty-first year then. That would make him born in 1824.
His birth was on the fourth day of May. People back in them days lived
longer than we do now. My grandfather, Jordan Marti