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(Bright Mulatto)
Age 65? Address Brinkley, Arkansas
"My parents name was Mary Ann and Sam Billingslea. Mother's father lived with us when I first remember. His
name was Robert Todd. He was a brown skin Negro. They said he was a West Indian. He talked of olden times but I
don't remember well enough to tell you. Father owned a home that we was living on when I first remember. Mother
was bright color, too. Vaden, Mississippi was our trading post. Mother had twenty children. She was a worker. She
would work anywhere she was put. My folks never talked much about slavery. I don't know how they got our place.
"I know they was bothered by the Ku Klux. One night they heard or saw the Ku Klux coming. The log house set
low on the ground but was dug out to keep potatoes and things in - a cellar like. The planks was wide, bout a foot
wide, rough pine, not nailed down. They lifted the planks up and all lay down and put the planks back up. The
house look like outside nothing could go under it, it was setting on the hard ground. When they got there and
opened the doors they saw nobody at home and rode off.
"Another time, one black night, a man - he must have been a soldier - strided a block step with his horse and
ordered supper. She told him she didn't have nothing cooked and very little to cook. He cursed and ordered the
supper. Told her to get it. She pretended to be fixing it and slipped out the back door down the furrows and squatted
in the briers in a fence corner. Long time after she had been out there hid, he come along, jumped the fence on his
horse, jumped over her back, down into the lane and to the road he went. If the horse hadn't jumped over her and
had struck her he would have killed her. Now I think he was a soldier, not the Ku Klux. I heard my father say he
was a yard boy.
"I married in Mississippi and came to Malvern and Hot Springs. He was a mill hand. I raised three children of my
own and was a chamber maid. I kept house and cooked for Mrs. Bera McCafity, a rich woman in Hot Springs. My
husband died and was buried at Malvern. I married again, in Hot Springs, and lived there several years. We went to
the steel mill at Gary, Indiana. He died. I come back here and to Brinkley in 1920. One daughter lives in Detroit and
one in Chicago. The youngest one is married, has a family and a hard time; the other makes her living. It takes it all
to do her. I get $8.00 on the P.W.A.
"They all accuse me around here of talking mighty proper. I been around fine city folks so much I notice how they
speak.
"I don't fool with voting. I don't care to vote unless it would be some town question to settle. I would know
something about it and the people.
"I don't know my age. I was grown when I married nearly sixty years ago. We have to show our license to get on
the W.P.A. or our age in the Bible you understand."
Interviewer Mrs. Bernice Bowden"
