They too fast fo me. If I see 'em
they talkin' a passel of foolish talk. Whut I knows is times is hard wid
me shows you born.
"You come back to see me. If you don't I wanter meet you all in heaben.
By, by, by."
Interviewer: Watt McKinney
Person interviewed: Dock Wilborn
A mile or so from Marvell, Arkansas
Age: 95
Dock Wilborn was born a slave near Huntsville, Alabama on January 7,
1843, the property of Dan Wilborn who with his three brothers, Elias,
Sam, and Ike, moved to Arkansas and settled near Marvell in Phillips
County about 1855.
According to "Uncle Dock" the four Wilborn brothers each owning more
than one hundred slaves acquired a large body of wild, undeveloped land,
divided this acreage between them and immediately began to erect
numerous log structures for housing themselves, their Negroes, and their
stock, and to deaden the timber and clear the land preparatory to
placing their crops the following season. The Wilborns arrived in
Arkansas in the early fall of the year and for several months they
camped, living in tents until such time that they were able to complete
the erection of their residences. Good, substantial, well constructed
and warm cabins were built in which to house the slaves, much better
buildings "Uncle Dock" says than those in which the average Negro
sharecropper lives today on Southern cotton plantations.
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