d blackberries and bring em to the house.

"Yes, I done left there thirty-six years--will be this August.

"When we was small, my daddy would make horse collars, cotton baskets
and mattresses at night and work in the field in the daytime and preach
on Sunday. He fell down in Bedie Kellog's lot throwin' up shucks in the
barn. He was standin' on the wagon and I guess he lost his balance. They
sent and got the best doctor in the country and he said he broke his
nabel string. They preached his funeral ever year for five years. Seemed
like they just couldn't give him up.

"White folks told my mother if she wouldn't marry again and mess up
Uncle Jake's chillun, they'd help her, but she married that man and he
beat us so I don't know how I can remember anything. He wouldn't let us
go to school. Had to work and just live like pigs.

"Oh, I used to be a tiger bout work, but I fell on the ice in
'twenty-nine and I ain't never got over it. I said I just had a death
shock.

"I never went to school but three months in my life. Didn't go long
enough to learn anything.

"I was bout a mile from where I was born when I professed religion. My
daddy had taught us the right way. I tell you, in them days you couldn't
join the church unless you had been changed.

"I come here when they was emigratin' the folks here to Arkansas."

Interviewer: Miss Irene Robertson
Person interviewed: Liney Chambers, Brinkley, Arkansas
Age:

[TR: Some word pronunciation was marked in this interview. Letters
surrounded by [] represent long vowels.]

"I was born in Tennessee close to Memphis. I remember seein' the
Yankees. I was most too little to be very scared of them. They had their
guns but they didn't bother us. I was born a slave. My mother cooked for
Jane and Silas Wory. My mother's name was Caroline. My father's name was
John. An old bachelor named Jim Bledsoe owned him. When the war was over
I don't remember what happened. My mother moved away. She and my father
didn't live together. I had one brother, Proctor. I expect he is dead.
He lived in California last I heard of him.

"They just expected freedom all I ever heard. I know they didn't expect
the white folks to give them no land cause the man what owned the land
bought it hisself foe he bought the hands whut he put on it. They
thought they was ruined bad enouf when the hands left them. They kept
the land and that is about all there was left. Whut the Yankees didn't
take they w