er was learned in the shoe makin' trade. When
they come to Knoxville to live, and where I was born, they had a great
big shoe shop out there close to where Governor Brownlow lived.
Knoxville just had three streets, two runnin' east and west and one
run north and south. I well remember when General Burnside come to
Knoxville. That was endurin' the siege of Knoxville. Before he marched
his men out to the Battle of Fort Saunders, he stopped his solider
[TR: soldier] band in front of our shoe shop and serenaded my mother
and father. I was a little boy and I climed up on the porch bannisters
and sat there and lissen' to that music."

"I remember another big man come here once when I was a boy and I
served the transient trade at a little eatin' place right where the
Atkin Ho-tel is now. Jeff Davis come there to eat, when he stopped
over between trains. That was in 1869. No, I disremember what he eat
or how he behave. He didnt seem no different from any other man. He
was nince lookin' wore a long tail coat and his boots was plenty
blacked. He favored pictures of Abraham Lincoln. Was about
middle-height and had short, dark chin-whiskers. I were very busy at
the time, an' if they was any excitement I didnt know it."

"Yes, I've seen many a slave in my day. One of my boy playmates was a
slave child. His name is Sam Rogan and he lives now at the County Poor
Farm. I make it a point not to dwell too much on slave times. I was
learned different. I've had considerable schoolin', went to my first
school in the old First Presbyterian church. My teachers was white
folks from the North. They give us our education and give us clothes
and things sent down here from the North. That was just after the
surrender. I did see a terrible sight once. A slave with chains on him
as long as from here to the street. He was in an ole' buggy, settin'
between two white men and they was passin' througn Knoxville. My
mother and father wouldnt lissen' to me tell 'em about it when I got
home. And I hope I forget everything I ever knowed or heard about
salves [TR: slaves], and slave times."

Joseph Leonidas Star, no longer works at the shoemakers trade. He
writes poetry and lives leisurely in a three room frame shanty, in a
row of shabbier ones that face each other disconsolately on a typical
Negro alleyway, that has no shade trees and no paving. "Lee's" house
is the only one that does not wabble uneasily, flush with the muddy
alley. His stands on a small b