Pulaski County W.P.A. Slave Narratives--Elijah Henry Hopkins, Little Rock �My father�s master was old Tom Willingham, an awful big farmer who owned farms in Georgia and South Carolina, both. He lived in southwest Georgia in Baker County. Old man Willingham�s wife was Phoebe Hopkins. Her mother was old lady Hopkins. I don�t know what the rest of her name was. We never called her nothin� but old lady Hopkins or Mother Hopkins. She was one of the richest women in the state. When she died, her estate was divided among her children and grandchildren. Her slaves were part of her estate. They were divided among her children and grandchildren, too. Tom Willingham�s family come in for its part. He had three sons, Tom, Jr., John, and Robert. My father already belonged to Tom Willingham, Sr., so he stayed with him. But my mother belonged to old lady Hopkins, and she went to Robert, so my daddy and mother were separated before I knew my daddy. My father stayed with old man Willingham until freedom. �Robert Willingham was my mother�s master. He never married. When he died he willed all his slaves free. But his relatives got together and broke the will and never did let �em go. �When I saw my father to know him, I saw him out in Georgia. They told me that was my father. Then he had another wife and a lot of children. My mother brought me up and my father taken charge of me after she died and after freedom�about a year after. It was close to emancipation because the states were still under martial law. �I was born May 15, 1856, in the Barnwell district, South Carolina. They used to call them districts then. It would be Barnwell County now. They changed and started calling �em counties in 1866 or thereabouts. I was running around when they mustered the men in for the Civil War, and I was about nine years old when the War ended. I was about ten when my mother died and my father taken charge of me. I was taken from South Carolina when I was about four years old and carried into Georgia and stayed there until emancipation. My mother didn�t tarry long in Georgia after she was emancipated. She went back into South Carolina; but she died in a short time, as I just said. Then my father taken charge of me. I got married in South Carolina in 1885, and then I came out here in 1886�to Arkansas. Little Rock was the first place I came to. I didn�t stay here a great while. I went down to the Reeder farm on the Arkansas River just about sixteen miles above Pine Bluff. I started share cropping but taken down sick. I never could get used to drinking that bottom water. Then I went to Pine Bluff and went to work with the railroad and helped to widen the gauge of the Cotton Belt Road. Then the next year they started the Sewer Contract, and I worked in that and I worked on the first water plant they started. In working with the King Manufacturing Company I learned piping. �I stayed in Pine Bluff sixteen years. My wife died August 1, 1901. A couple of years after that, I came back to Little Rock, and have been here ever since. I went to work on the Illinois Central Railroad just across the river, which is now the Rock Island Railroad. After it became the Rock Island, the bridge was built across the river east of Main Street. They used to go over the old Baring Cross Bridge and had to pay for it. The Missouri Pacific enjoined the Rock Island and wouldn�t let it go straight through, so they built their own bridge and belted the city and went on around. I got stricken down sick in 1930 and haven�t been able to do heavy work since. You know, a plumber and steam-fitter have to do awful heavy work. �I get a little old age assistance from the state. They are supposed to give me commodities but my card got out and they ain�t never give me another one. I went down to see about it today, and they said they�d mail me another one.� �My mother was always right in the house with the white people and I was fed just like I was one of their children. They even done put me to bed with them. You see, this discrimination on color wasn�t as bad then as it is now. They handled you as a slave but they didn�t discriminate against you on account of color like they do now. Of course, there were brutal masters then just like there are brutal people now. Louisiana and Alabama and Mississippi always were tough states on colored people. South Carolina and Georgia got that way after people from those places came in and taught them to mistreat colored people. Yet in Alabama and Louisiana where they colored people were worse treated, it seems that they got hold of more property and money. Same way it was in Mississippi.� �The patrollers was just a set of mean men organized in every section of the country. If they�d catch a nigger out and he didn�t have a pass, they�d tie him up and whip him and then they�d take him back. You had to have a pass to be out at night. Even in the daytime you couldn�t go no great distance without a pass. Them big families�rich families�that had big plantations would come together and the niggers from two or three places might go to a church on one of them. But you couldn�t go no place where there wasn�t a white man looking on.� �Some of the white people thought so much of their slaves that they would teach them how to write and read. But they would teach them secretly and they would teach them not to read or write out where anybody would notice them. They didn�t mind you reading as much as they minded you writing. If they�d catch YOU now and it was then, they�d take you out and chop off them fingers you�re doing that writing with.� �My daddy was a builder. Old man Willingham gave him freedom and time to work on his own account. He gave him credit for what work he done for him. He got three hundred dollars a year for my father�s time, but all the money was collected by him, because my father being a slave couldn�t collect any money from anybody. When my father�s master died, he may have had money deposited with him. But he was strictly honest with my father. No matter how much he collected, he wouldn�t take no more�n three hundred dollars and he put all the rest to the credit of my father. He said three hundred dollars was enough to take.� �The owners went to work and notified the slaves that they were free. After the proclamation was issued, the government had agents who went all through the country to see if the slaves had been freed. They would see how the proclamation was being carried out. They would ask them, �How are you working?� �You are free.� �What are you getting?� Some of them would say, �I ain�t gettin� nothin� now.� Well, the agent would take that up and they would have that owner up before the government. Maybe he would be working people for a year and giving them nothin� before they found him out. There are some places where they have them cases yet. Where they have people on the place and ain�t paying them nothin�.� �I have seen thousands and thousands of soldiers. Sometimes it would take a whole day for them to pass through. When Sherman�s army marched through Atlanta, it took more than a day. I was in Atlanta then. He sent word ahead that he was coming through and for all people that weren�t soldiers to get out of the town. I saw the Rebels, too; I saw them when they stacked their arms. Looked like there was a hundred or more rifles in each stack. They just come up and pitched them down. They had to stack their arms and turn them over. �I was taken to Georgia when I was four years old, you know. I recollect when all the people came up to swear allegiance, and when they were hurrying out to get away from Sherman�s army. They fit in Atlanta and then marched on toward Savannah. Then they crossed over into South Carolina. They went on through Columbia and just tore it up. Then they worked their way on back into Georgia. They didn�t fight in Augusta though. �Jeff Davis was captured not far from my father�s place. Jeff Davis had a big army, but the biggest thing he had was about a thousand wagons or more piled up with silver and other things belonging to the Confederacy. He was supposed to be taking care of that. He had to turn it over to the North.� �They had a kind of money right after the Civil War�paper money gotten out by the United States Government and supposed to be good. The Confederate money was no good but this money�these �shin plasters� as they were called�was good money issued by the government. They did away with it and called it all in. You could get more for it now than it is worth. The old green back took its place but the �shin plaster� was in all sizes. It wasn�t just a dollar bill. It was in pinnies, five cents, ten cents, twenty-five cents, and then they skipped on up to fifty cents, and they didn�t have nothin� more till you got to a dollar.� �I haven�t had a great deal of schooling. I have had a little about in places. Just after the emancipation, my mother died and my father married again. My stepmother had other children and they kept me out of my education. Since I have been grown, I have gotten a little training here and there. Still I have served as supervisor of elections and done other things that they wanted educated people to do. But it was just merely a pick-up of my own. The first teachers I had were white women from the North.� �I have never taken a great deal of interest in politics. Only in the neighborhood where I lived there was a colony of colored people at Bentley, South Carolina. They chose me to represent them at the polls and I did the best I could. I got great credit for both the colored and the white people for that. But I never took much interest in politics. �My father spent a fortune in it but I never could see that it benefited him. I never did care for any kind of office except a mail contract that I had once to haul mail. I went through that successfully and never lost a pouch or anything but at the end of the year I throwed it up. I couldn�t trust anyone else to handle it for me and I had to meet trains at all hours. The longest I could sleep was two or three hours a night, so I gave it up at the end of the year.� �Some of the masters treated us worse than dogs and others treated us fine. Colonel Robert Willingham freed his slaves but his sisters and brothers wouldn�t stand for it. They went and stole us off and sold us. My mother being a thrifty colored woman and a practical nurse, everywhere she went, a case gave thirty dollars and her board and mine. My father paid his master three hundred dollars a year. He built these gin houses and presses. The old man would write him passes and everything and see that he was paid for his work. Some years, he would make as much as three or four thousand dollars. His master collected it and held it for him and gave it to him when he wanted it. That was during slavery times.� �Slavery days were hard but in the same time the colored people fared better than now because the white folks taken up for them and they raised what they needed to eat. You couldn�t go nowhere but what people had plenty to eat. Now they can�t do it. �A hundred years from now, they won�t be any such thing as Negroes. There will be just Americans. The white people are mixed up with Greeks, Germans, and Italians and everything else now. There are mighty few pure Americans now. There used to be plenty of them right after the War. �They�re sending the young people to school and all like that but they don�t seem to me to have their minds on any industry. They have got to have backing after they get educated. Now, they�ll bring these foreigners in and use them. In the majority of states now the colored man ain�t no good unless he can get some kind of trade education and can go into some little business. �In slavery times, a poor white man was worse off than a n----r. General Lee said that he was fighting for the benefit of the South, but not for slavery. He didn�t believe in slavery.� �I came to Arkansas in 1886. I got married in 1885 in South Carolina. I never had but the one wife. I have done a little railroading, worked in machinery. I have planted one crop. Did that in 1887 but got sick and had to sell out my crop. For forty-six years, I worked as a plumber and piper. I worked in piping oil, gas, water, and I worked with mechanics who didn�t mind a colored man learning. They would let me learn and they would send me out to do jobs. Interviewer: Samuel S. Taylor May 31, 1938 at Mr. Hopkin's home, 1308� Ringo Street, Little Rock |