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519 W. Ninth Street, Little Rock, Arkansas
Age About 70
Occupation Making cotton and corn
"I was born in Louisiana---in Vidalia. My mother's name was Emma Grant. My father's name was George Grant.
My mother's name before she married was Emma Woodbridge. I don't know the names of my grand folks. I heard
my mother say that my grandmother was named Matilda Woodbridge. I never got to see her. That is what I heard
my mother say.
"I don't know the names of my mother's master, and I don't know the names of my father's white folks.
"My father was George Grant. He served in the War. I think they said that he was with them when Vicksburg
surrendered. My father has said that he was really named George LeGrande. But after he enlisted in the War, he
went by the name of George Grant. There was one of the officers by that name, and he took it too. He was shot in
the hip during the War. When he died, he still was having trouble with that wound. He was on the Union side. He
was fighting for our freedom. He wasn't no Reb. He'd tell us a many a day, 'I am part of the cause that you are free.'
I don't know where he was when he enlisted. He said he was sold out from Louisville---him and his brother.
"I never did hear him say that he was whipped or treated bad when he was a slave. I've heard him tell how he had to
stand up on dead people to shoot when he was in the War.
"My brother started twice to get my father's pension, but he never was able to do anything about it. They made away
with the papers somehow and we never did get nothin'. My father married a second time before he died. When he
died, my stepmother tried to get the pension. They writ back and asked her if he had any kin, and she answered
them and said no. She hid the papers and wouldn't let us have 'em---took and locked 'em up somewheres where we
couldn't find 'em. She was so mean that if she couldn't get no pension, she didn't want nobody else to get none.
"I don't know just when I was born, nor how old I am. When I come to remember anything, I was free. But I don't
know how old I am, nor when it was.
"I heard my father speak of pateroles. Just said that they'd ketch you. He used to soars us by telling us that the
pateroles would ketch us. We thought that was something dreadful.
"I never heard nothin' about jayhawkers. I heard something about Ku Klux, but I don't know what it was.
"My father married my mother just after the War.
"I been married twice. My first husband got killed on the levee. And the second is down in the country somewheres.
We are separated.
"I don't get no help from the Welfare, wish I did. I ain't had no money to get to the doctor with my eyes."
The old lady sat with her eyes nearly closed while I questioned her and listened to her story. Those eyes ran and
looked as though they needed attention badly. The interview was conducted entirely on the porch as was that of
Annie Parks. Traffic interrupted; friends interrupted; and a daughter interrupted from time to time. But this
daughter, while a little suspicious, was in no degree hostile. The two of them referred me to J. T. Tims, who, they
said, knew a lot about slavery. His story is given along with this one.
I got the impression that the old lady was born before the War, but I accepted her statement and put her down as
born since the War and guessed her age as near seventy. She was evidently quite reserved about some details. Her
father's marriage to her mother after the War would not recessarily mean that he was not married to her slave
fashion before the War. She didn't care so much about giving any story, but she was polite and obliging after she
had satisfied herself as to my identity and work.
Interviewer Samuel S. Taylor"
Thomas, Omelia -- Additional Interview
1014 W. Fifth Street, Little Rock, Arkansas
Age 63
"I was born in Marianna, Lee County, in Arkansas. I wasn't born right in the town but out a piece from the town in
the old Bouden place, in 1875. My father kept a record of all births and deaths in his Bible. He never forgot
whenever a new baby would come to get down his glasses and pen and ink and Bible. My daddy learned to read and
write after the emancipation.
"My father's name was Frank Johnson and my mother's name was Henrietta Johnson. I don't know the given names
of my father's and mother's parents. I do know my mother's mother's name, Lucinda, and my father's mother was
named Stephens. I don't know their given names. My mother's master was a Trotter.
"My father was a free man. He hired his own time. He told me that his father hired his own time and he would go
off and work. He made washots. He would go off and work and bring back money and things. His mother was free
too. When war was declared, he volunteered to go. He was with the Yankees. My father worked just like my
grandfather did. Whenever he had a job to do. He never had a lick from anybody, carried his gun strapped down on
his side all the time and never went without it.
"After the War, he worked on a steamboat. They used to kick the roustabouts about and run them around but they
never laid the weight of their hands on him.
"They wouldn't allow him to go to school in slavery time. After the war, he got a Hlue Back Speller and would
make a bowl of fire and at night he would study---sometimes until daybreak. Then he found an old man that would
help him and he studied under him for a while. He never want to any regular school, but he went to night school a
little. Most of what he got, he got himself.
"He was born in Louisville, Kentucky. I don't know how he happened to meet my mother. During the time after the
War, he went to running on the boat from New Orleans to Friars (Fniai) Point, Mississippi. Then he would come
over to Helena. In going 'round, he met my mother near Marianna and married her.
"Mother never had much to say, and the other girls would have a big time talking. He noticed that she was sewing
with ravelings and he said, 'Lady, next time I come I'll bring you a spool of thread if you don't mind.' He brought the
thread and she didn't mind, and from then on, they went to courting. Finally they married. They married very shortly
after the War.
"My mother was a motherless girl. My daddy said he looked at her struggling along. All the other girls were trying
to have a good time. But she would be settin' down trying to make a quilt or something alse useful, and he said to a
friend of his, 'That woman would make a good wife; I am going to marry her.' And he did.
"She used to spin her fine and coarse sewing thread and yarn to make socks and stockings with. Her stockings and
socks for the babies and papa would always be yarn. She could do pretty work. She had a large family. She had
sevanteen children and she kept them all in things she made harself. She raised ten of them. She would make the
thread and yarn and the socks and stockings for all of these. I have known the time when she used to make coats and
pants for my father and brothers.
She would make them by hand because they didn't have any machines than. Of course, she made all the undersear.
She put up preserves and jellies for us to eat in the winter. She used to put up kraut and stuff by the barral. I have
seen some happy days when I was with my daddy and mother. He raised pigs and hogs and chickens and cows. He
raised all kinds of peas and vegetables. He raised those things chiefly for the home, and he made cotton for money.
He would save about eight or ten bales and put them under his shed for stockings and clothes and everything. He
would have another cotton selling in March.
"When my father was in the army, he would sometimes be out in the weather, he told us, and he and the other
soldiers would wrap up in their blankets and sleep right in the snow itself.
"I farmed all my life until 1897. I farmed all my life till then. I was at home. I married in 1895. My first husband
and I made three crops and then he stopped and went to public work. After that I never farmed any more but went to
cooking and doing laundry work. I came from Clarendon here in 1901.
"I never had any experiences with the Yankees. My mother used to tell how they took all the old master's
stuff---mules and sugar---and then throwed it out and rode their horses through it when they didn't want it for
theirelves.
"I married a second time. I have been single now for the last three years. My husband died on the twentieth of
August three years ago. I ain't got no business here at all. I ought to be at my home living well. I work for what I get
and I'm proud of it.
"A working woman has many things to contend with. That girl downtairs keeps a gang of men coming and going,
and sometimes some of them sometimes try to come up here. Sunday night when I come home from church, one
was standing in the dark by my door waiting for me. I had this stick in my hand and I ordered him down. He saw I
meant business; so he went on down. Some of them are determined.
"There's no hope for tomorrow so far as these young folks are concerned. And the majority of the old people are
almost worse than the young ones. Used to be that all the old people were mothers and fathers but now they are all
going together. Everything is in a critical condition. There is not much truth in the land. All human affection is
gone. There is mighty little respect. The way some peopls carry on is pitiful."
The men who bother Omelia Thomas probably take her for a young woman. She hasn't a gray hair in her head, and
her akin is smooth and must be well kept. She looks at least twenty-five years younger than she is, and but for the
accident of her presence at another interview, I would never have dreamed that she had a story to tell.
I went to see her in the quarters where she lives---over the garage in the back yard of the white people she works
for. When I got halfway up the stairs, she shouted, "You can't come up here." I paused in perplexity for a moment,
and she stuck her head out the door and looked. Then she said, "Oh, I beg pardon; I thought you were one of those
men that visit downstairs." I had noticed the young lady below as I entered. She is evidently a hot number, and as
troublesome as a sore thumb to the good old lady above her.
Interviewer Mrs. Bernice Bowden"
