Lucy Thomas
Text
"My name am Lucy Baldwin Thomas and I's birthed right here in Harrison County, on the old Baldwin place at Fern Lake. The log cabin where I's birthed sot in a grove of trees right by the lake. The Baldwin place jined the Haggerty and Major Andrews places.
"The best statement I can make of my age am I's 'bout fourteen the last year of Abe Lincoln's war. It was true, 'cause I starts hoein' in the field when I's nine years old and I'd been hoein' a long time.
"They called my papa, Ike. The Baldwins bought him out of Alabama, and mama's name was Nancy and she's birthed in Virginny, and the Baldwins bought her out the New Orleans slave market for $1,100.00. I's heared my gran'ma, Barbara, tell how some Alabama owners drug they niggers with a mule and laid dem face down in a hole and beat dem till they's raw as beefsteak. But her folks wasn't like that and the Baldwins wasn't neither. They was good white folks, and Missy was named May Amelia and then there was Old Marse Doctor William. He was a doctor but he worked a hundred acres land and owned 'bout eighty-five niggers, what lived in log quarters. They had son-of-a-gun beds peg to the walls, and wore bachelor brogan shoes and blue and stripe lowel clothes made on the place, and had lots to eat. My mama say she had a lots better time in slavery than after.
"All hands was up and in the field by daylight and Marse Baldwin allus kep' a fifty gallon barrel whiskey on the place and a demijohn on the front porch all the time for the niggers to git they drink on way to the field. But nobody ever got drunk.
"Marse's brother-in-law, Marse Lewis Brantly, was overseer, but never kicked and beat the niggers. He give us a light breshin' when we needed it. We would go mos' anywhere but had to git a pass first, and had play parties on Saturday night.
"I went to school three months. A Yankee named Old Man Mills run a school and I quit workin' in the field to go. Them days, the Klu Kluxers was runnin' round and I seed big bunches of niggers with they heads tied up, goin' to report the Kluxers to the Progee Marshal.
"Three years after it was all over, my folks moved to the Haggerty place. I know lots 'bout old Col. Haggerty's widow. She was an Indian and her first husband was a big chief of the Caddo Indians on Caddo Lake. He betrayed the Indians to the white folks and he and her hid on a cave on the lake, and she slipped out to git food, and the Indians took him away. They say they scalped him like they done white folks. Then she married Col. Haggerty and he got kilt on a gamblin' spree and left her a lot of land and 'bout three hundred slaves. She kept a nigger woman chained to a loom for a year and when she knew the slaves was gittin' free, she poisoned a lot of dem and buried dem at night. We'd hear the other slaves moanin' and cryin' at night for the dead ones. That widow Haggerty was somthin'!
"I seed the 'Mattie Stephens' boat the day after it burned and kilt sixty people. Me and Anthony Thomas went to Marshall and married the day 'fore it burnt. That was on February 12th, in 1869. I lived with him fifty-five years and raised seven chillen, and after he died I kep' on farmin' until 'bout three years ago. Then I come to live with one my son's here and this land we're on right now was part the land old Marse Baldwin owned. I gits $10.00 a month from the gov'ment. They sho' is good to me, and my son is good, too, so I's happy in my old age."
