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804 Izard Street, Little Rock, Arkansas
Age 78
"I was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, and I was four years old when the Civil War closed. My parents died
when I was a baby and a white lady named Mrs. Mary Peters took me and raised me. They moved from there to
Champaign, Illinois when I was about six years old. My mother died when I was born. Them white people only had
two slaves, my mother and my father, and my father had run off with the Yankees. Mrs. Peters was their mistress.
She died when I was eight years old and then I stayed with her sister. That was when I was up in Champaign.
"The sister's name was Mrs. Mary Smith. She just taught school here and there and around in different places, and I
went around with her to take care of her children. That kept up until I was twenty years old. All of her traveling was
in Illinois.
"I didn't get much schooling. I went to school a while and taken sore eyes. The doctor said if I continued to go to
school, I would strain my eyes. After he told me that I quit. I learned enough to read the Bible and the newspaper
and a little something like that, but I can't do much. My eyes is very weak yet.
"When I was twenty years old I married Henry Johnson, who was from Virginia. I met him in Champaign. We
stayed in Champaign about two years. Then we came on down to St. Louis. He was just traveling 'round looking for
work and staying wherever there was a job. Didn't have no home nor nothing.
He was a candy maker by trade, but he did anything he could get to do. He's been dead for forty years now. He
came down here, then went back to Champaign and died in Springfield, Illinois while I was here.
"I don't get no pension, don't get nothing. I get along by taking in a little washing now and then.
"My mother's name was Eliza Johnson and my father's name was Joe Johnson. I don't know a thing about none of
my grandparents. And I don't know what my mother's name was before she married.
"A gentleman what worked on the place where I lived said that if you didn't have a pass during slave times, that if
the pateroles caught you, they would whip you and make you run back home. He said he had to run through the
woods every which way once to keep them from catching him.
"I have heard the old folks talk about being put on the block. The colored woman I lived with in Champaign told me
that they put her on the block and sold her down into Ripley, Mississippi.
"She said that the way freedom came was this. The boss man told her she was free. Some of the slaves lived with
him and some of them picked up and went on off somewhere.
"The Ku Klux never bothered me. I have heard some of the colored people say how they used to come 'round and
bother the church services looking for this one and that one.
"I don't know what to say about these young folks. I declare, they have just gone wild. They are almost getting like
brutes. A woman come by here the other day without more 'n a spoonful of things on and stopped and struck a
match and lit her cigarette. You can't talk to them neither. I don't know what we ought to do about it. They let these
white men run around with them. I see 'em doing anything. I think times are bad and getting worse.
Just as that shooting they had over in North Little Rock. (Shooting and robbing of Rev. Sherman, an A. M. E.
minister, by Negro robbers.)
Interviewer Miss Irene Robertson"
