Interviewer: Miss Irene Robertson
Person interviewed: Betty Curlett, Hazen, Arkansas
Age: 66
[-- -- 1938]


"I can tell you all about my kin folks. My mama's owners was Mars John
Moore and Miss Molly Moore. They come from Virginia and brought Grandma
Mahaley and Grandpa Tom.

"Mr. Daniel Johnson went to North Carolina and bought Alice and John and
their family. When he brought them to Mississippi, they come in a hack.
It was snowing and cold. It took em so long to came they take turns
walkin'. Grandma was walking long wid the hack and somewhere she cut
through and climbed over a railin' fence. She lost her baby outer her
quilts and went on a mile fore she knowed bout it. She say, 'Lawd,
Master Daniel, if I ain't lost my baby.' They stopped the hack and she
went back to see where her baby could be. She knowed where she got out
the hack and she knowed she had the baby then. Fore she got to the fence
she clum over, she seed her baby on the snow. She said the sun was warm
and he was well wrop up. That all what saved em. She shuck him round
till she woke him up. She was so scared he be froze. When he let out
cryin' she knowed he be all right. She put him in the foot of the hack
mong jugs of hot water what they had to keep em warm. She say he never
had a cold from it. Well, that was John, my papa, what she lost in de
snow. Grandma used to set and tell us that and way I can member it was
my own papa she be talkin' bout.