5.	:13•

	“I wa8 about 15 years old when the Civil War ended end was stiU living with Mi‘s. Blakely and helped care for her little children. Her daughter, Mies Lenora, later married H. M. Hudgens, and I then went to live with her and cared for her children. When her daughter Miss Helen married Proi~eaaor Wiggins, I took care of her little daughter, and this made tive generations that I have cared tor.

	“I~ir1ng the Civil War, Mr. Parks took all his slaves and all of bis fine stock, horses and cattle and went 8outh to Louisiana follow— Ing the Sçuthern army for protection. Many slave owners left the county taking with them their slaves and followed the army.

	“When the war was over, Mr. Parka was still in the South and gave to each one of his slaves who did not want to come back to Arkansas so much money. My uncle George came back with Mr. Parka and was given a good mountain farm of forty acres, which he put in cultivation and one of my uncle‘s descendenta still lives on the place. My mother did not return to Arkansas but went on to J‘oplin, Missouri, a~nd for more than fifty years, neither one of us knew where the other one was until one day a man from Fayetteville went into a restaurant in J‘oplin and ordered his breakfast ‚ and my mother who was in there heard him say be lived. in Fayetteville ‚ Arkansas. He lived just below the Hudgene home and when my mother enquireci about the family he told her I was stil]. alive and was with the family. While neither of us could read nor write we cor— responded through different people. ~t I never saw her after I was eleven years old. Later Mr. Hudgens went to Joplin to see if she was well taken care of. She owned her own little place and when she died there was enough money for her to be buried.