The Federal Writers' Project entitled "Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves" encompasses a rich oral history of slavery from those who experienced it. Completed between 1936 and 1938 during the Great Depression, this Works Project Administration endeavor had two goals: to employ writers and to record the stories of still-living former slaves. Daphne Williams is one of those former slaves who shared her story.
Daphne Williams, uncertain of her exact age, was estimated to be about 100 in 1937 when she spoke to the Writers' Project from her home near Hillister in Tyler County, Texas. She was born in Tallahassee, Florida, and came to Texas as a girl around the time that the Civil War began. Most of her recollections of slavery centered on her years in Florida, where her owner Nancy Herring lived. From her earliest recollections, she was a caretaker for the Herring children and was seldom allowed to interact with the other slave children. Her job was to make sure no harm came to her charges, and she told of having to “be careful not to let the briar scratch him or he git a scar on him," or her owners would "put a scar" on her. Williams later became the cook when her mother died.
Williams recalled that her widowed mistress sent most of her slaves to Texas just before the Civil War began, in what Williams recalled as an attempt to "smuggle," and Williams was also moved to Texas, traveling in a boat "as big as a house." Williams recalled arriving and seeing "all the pretty trees" in East Texas, a site unfamiliar on the bare and flat landscape around Tallahassee. The Herrings and their slaves settled about five miles from Woodville in Tyler County.
When freedom came to Texas after the war's end, Herring let the former slaves stay on for a bit and then gave an allowance to those who wanted to move on. Williams' uncle told her to "go and look out for number one" and so she moved on. Records indicate that she remained in Tyler County and lived there until her death in 1941.
]]>During the Great Depression, the U.S. Government funded a special Federal Writers' Project to support authors like John Steinbeck and Ralph Ellison. As part of this effort, the government also paid interviewers to record the personal stories of African Americans who had experienced slavery during the nineteenth century. One former slave, Betty Simmons, was, by her own estimation, between 100- and 102-years-old at the time of her interview in Beaumont, Texas around 1937.
Like many of the other people interviewed for the Slave Narratives project, Simmons had vivid memories of her time as a slave. She was born in Macedonia, Alabama, to a free man, yet Betty was not free. She and her mother belonged to Leftwidge Carter until he was financially ruined. At that time, she was sold and resold to slave traders. She eventually made her way to Texas via the slave market in New Orleans, and never again saw her family in Alabama.
As the property of Colonel Fortescue in Liberty, Texas, Simmons led a simple life. She related that her master had been good to her and had even allowed her to keep a garden and animals where she lived. She also recalled a darker moment, however, when a young slave boy ran away and the dogs were sent after him. After Colonel Fortescue saw how the dogs had mangled the poor boy's body, he refused to pay the recapture fee.
Simmons married George Fortescue at some point during her time as a slave. The couple had at least fourteen children, seven of whom lived into adulthood. And, Simmons remembered well when freedom came, and with it, the relief that her toddler would not be sent out into the fields to work.
At the end of the Civil War, Colonel Fortescue gave his former property some of the crops from the fields they worked as slaves, but little else. As Betty recollected, “We gits on all right after freedom, but it hard at first ‘cause us didn’t know how to do for ourselves. But we has to learn.” According to one of her descendents, Betty Simmons died in 1941, at the age of 108.
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