five doctors. And anybody don't
believe it, they can go down there and look up the record.

"We had plenty to eat in slave times. Didn't have to go to the store
and buy it by the dribble like they does now. Just go to the
smokehouse and get it.

"I got such a big mind and will I wants to get about and raise
something to eat now so we wouldn't have to buy everything, but I
ain't able now. I've had twenty-one children but if I had em now
they'd starve to death.

"I been married four times but they all dead--every one of em.

"When freedom come my old master give my mother $500 cause she saved
his money for him when the Yankees come. She put it in the bed and
slept on it. He had four farms and he told her she could have ary one
of em and any of the stock, but my father had done spoke for a place
in Cleveland County--he had done bought him a place.

"And old master on his dying bed, he asked my mother to take his two
youngest children and raise em cause their mother was sickly, but she
didn't do it.

"I don't know hardly what to think of this younger generation. Used to
be they'd go to Sunday school barefooted but now'days, time they is
born they got shoes and stockin's on em.

"I used to spin, knit and weave. I even spun thread to make these
ropes they use to plow. I could spin a thread you could sew with, and
weave cloth with stripes and flowers. Have to know how to dye the
thread. That's all done in the warp. Call the other the filler.

"Now let me tell you, when that was goin' on and you raised your meat
and corn and potatoes, that was livin'!"

Interviewer: Mrs. Bernice Bowden
Person interviewed: Edmond Jones
1824 W. Second, Pine Bluff, Arkansas
Age: 75

"I growed up in the war. I remember seein' the soldiers--hundreds and
thousands of em. Oh, yes'm, I growed up in the war. I was born under
Abraham Lincoln's administration and then Grant.

"I remember when that old drum beat everbody had to be in bed at nine
o'clock. That was when they had martial law. Hays knocked that out you
know. That was when they had the Civil Rights Bill. I growed up in
that.

"Abraham Lincoln issued the Proclamation of Freedom in January and I
was born in May so you might say I was born right into freedom.

"I always say I was born so close to slavery I could smell it, just
like you cookin' somethin' for dinner and I smelled it.

"I tell these young people I can look back to my boy days quick as