keep on bowing and scraping when we are 'round white folks like we did
when we was slaves. They had us down and they kept us down. But that
was the way they been taught, and I don't blame them for it none, I
reckon.

When I git about thirty years old I marry Betty Sadler close to Waco,
and we come up to the Creek Nation forty years ago. We come to
Muskogee first, and then to Tulsa about thirty seven years ago.

We had ten children but only seven are alive. Three girls and a boy
live here in Tulsa and we got one boy in Muskogee and one at
Frederick, Oklahoma.

I sells milk and makes my living, and I keeps so busy I don't think
back on the old days much, but if anybody ask me why the Texas Negroes
been kept down so much I can tell them. If they set like I did on the
bank at that ferry across the Sabine, and see all that long line of
covered wagons, miles and miles of them, crossing that river and going
west with all they got left out of the War, it aint hard to
understand.

Them whitefolks done had everything they had tore up, or had to run
away from the places they lived, and they brung their Negroes out to
Texas and then right away they lost them too. They always had them
Negroes, and lots of them had mighty fine places back in the old
states, and then they had to go out and live in sod houses and little
old boxed shotguns and turn their Negroes loose. They didn't see no
justice in it then, and most of them never did until they died. The
folks that stayed at home and didn't straggle all over the country had
their old places to live on and their old friends around them, but
them Texans was different.

So I says, when they done us the way they did they was jest doing the
way they was taught. I don't blame them, because anybody will do that.

Whitefolks mighty decent to me now, and I always tried to teach my
children to be respectful and act like they think the whitefolks they
dealing with expects them to act. That the way to git along, because
some folks been taught one way and some been taught another, and folks
always thinks the way they been taught.

Oklahoma Writers' Project
Ex-Slaves

BOB MAYNARD, AGE 79
23 East Choctaw
Weleetka, Oklahoma.

I was born near what is now Marlin, Texas, Falls County. My father was
Robert Maynard and my mother was Chanie Maynard, both born slaves. Our
Master, Gerard Branum, was a very old man and wore long white
whiskers. He sho' was a fine built man, and walked str