baker1997

@Book{ baker1997,
	editor = {T. Lindsay Baker and Julie P. Baker},
	title = {Till Freedom Cried Out: Memories of Texas Slave Life},
	address = {College Station},
	publisher = {Texas A\&M University Press},
	year = 1997,
}

Reprints WPA Narratives, including some Refugeed Slaves like Allen V. Manning (refugeed from Mississippi to Texas during the war; discusses his experiences on the road and before leaving, with emphasis on the master’s use of violence to ensure that slaves went with him first to Louisiana and then to Coryell County, Texas).

Manning on p. 58 connects refugee experience to postwar conditions:

I sells milk and makes my living, and I keeps so busy I don’t think back on the old days much, but if anybody asks me why the Texas Negroes been kept down so much I can tell them. If they set like I did on the bank at that ferry across the Sabine, and see all that long line of covered wagons, miles and miles of them, crossing that river and going west with all they got left out of the War, it aint hard to understand.

Them whitefolks done had everything they had tore up, or had to run away from the places they lived, and they brung their Negroes out to Texas and then right away they lost them too. They always had them Negroes, and lots of them had mighty fine places back in the old states, and then they had to go out and live in sod houses and little old boxed shotguns and turn their Negroes loose. They didn’t see no justice in it then, and most of them never did until they died. The folks that stayed at home and didn’t straggle all over the country had their old places to live on and their old friends around them, but the Texans was different.

So I says, when they done us the way they did they was jest doing the way they was taught. I don’t blame them, because anybody will do that.

Also includes narratives of

• Esther Easter, who reports a lengthy wagon ride from Missouri punctuated with violence before she was sold to a “Mrs. Vaughn at Bonham, Texas,” upon arrival in Texas;
• Sonny Greer, who came from Arkansas;
• Mary Lindsay, who describes how her master, a blacksmith, used an exemption paper to avoid conscription, and also vividly remembers the large number of refugees coming into Texas during the war. Her mistress was also a member of the Chickasaw nation, which she tried to use to make an appeal for her husband who had been conscripted;
• Liza Smith, who moved from Richmond to Waco, to Pine Bluff (Arkansas), and back to Wavo.
• J. W. Stinnett, who was born in Grayson County, Texas, in 1863 after a “Creek Indian name of Frank Stinnett” moved to Texas from Indian Territory with J. W.’s parents, whom he owned.