Laura Hart
From:
More Arkansas
Interviewer: Bernice Bowden
Person Interviewed: Laura Hart
Eleventh & Orange St., Pine Bluff, Arkansas
Age: 85
"I just can't tell you when I was born cause I don't know. My mother
said I was born on Christmas Eve morning. I'm a old woman. I was big
enough to work in slave times.
"Yes ma'am. I member when the war started. I was born in Arkansas. I'm a
Arkansas Hoosier. You know I had to have some age on me to work in slave
times.
"I pulled corn, picked cotton and drive the mule at the gin. Just walked
behind him all day. I've pulled fodder, pulled cotton stalks, chopped
down corn stalks. I never worked in the house when I was a child while I
was under the jurisdiction of the white folks.
"My old master was Sam Carson and his wife was named Phoebe Carson, boy
named Andrew and a daughter named Mary and one named Rosie.
"We had plenty to eat and went to church on Sunday. After the white
folks had their services we went in. The church was on his place right
across the river. That's where I was when freedom taken place.
"When the war started--I remember that all right--cause when they was
gettin' started old master sent a colored man to take his son's place in
the war.
"I was born up here at Fort Smith and brought here to Jefferson County
and sold--my mother and three chillun.
"Now wait--I'm goin' to give you the full history. My father's mother
was a white woman from the North and my father was a colored man. Her
folks run her here to Arkansas and she stayed with her brother till my
father was nine months old and then she went back North and my papa
stayed with his uncle.
"When his uncle died he willed my papa his place. He had it recorded at
the cotehouse in Little Rock that my papa was a free man. But he
couldn't stay in Arkansas free, so he just rambled 'till he found old
man Carson and my mother. He offered to buy my mother but old master
wouldn't sell her so he stayed with old man Carson till they was all
free.
"My white folks was tollable fair--they didn't beat up the people.
"My mother was as bright as you are. She could sit on her hair. Her
mother was a Creole and her father was a Frenchman. After freedom they
would a killed my father if it hadn't been for old Sam Carson, cause
they thought my mother was a white woman, she was so bright.
"Ku Klux? The Lord have mercy! I remember them. They came and surrounded
the house, hundreds of em. We had a loose plank in the floor and we'd
hide under the floor with the dogs and stay there, too, till they'd
gone.
"My father was a gambler. He gambled and farmed. My mother was a
Christian woman. When I got big enough to know anything, she was a
Christian woman.
"I married when I was fourteen. We lived at a place called 'Wildcat.'
Didn't have no school. Nothin' up there but saloons and gambling.
"Then we moved to what they called the Earl Wright place. I had four
chillun--three boys and one girl. Most of my work was in the field.
"I been here in Pine Bluff gwine on seventy-one years. You know--I
knowed this town when they wasn't but one store and two houses. I'm a
old woman--I ain't no baby.
"Honey, I even remember when the Indians was run out o' this town!
"Well, I done telled you all I know. In my comin' up, the colored people
didn't have time to study bout the chillun's ages."
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Hatty Haskell
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William H Harrison
