William Walters
From:
Oklahoma
Oklahoma Writers' Project
Ex-Slaves
WILLIAM WALTERS
Age 85 yrs.
Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Mammy Ann (that was my mother) was owned by Mistress Betsy, and lived
on the Bradford plantation in Relsford County, Tennessee, when I was
born in 1852.
My daddy, Jim Walters, then lived in Nashville, where my mammy carried
me when she ran away from the Mistress after the Rebs and Yanks
started to fight. My daddy died in Nashville in 1875.
We were runaway slaves. The slipper-offers were often captured, but
Mammy Ann and her little boy William (that's me) escaped the sharp
eyes of the patrollers and found refuge with a family of northern
symphatizers living in Nashville.
Nashville was a fort town, filled with trenches and barricades. Right
across the road from where we stayed was a vacant block used by the
Rebs as an emergency place for treating the wounded.
I remember the boom of cannons one whole day, and I heard the rumble
of army wagons as they crossed through the town. But there was nothing
to see as the fog of powder smoke became thicker with every blast of
Sesesh cannon.
When the smoke fog cleared away I watched the wounded being carried to
the clearing across the road--fighting men with arms shot off, legs
gone, faces blood smeared--some of them just laying there cussing God
and Man with their dying breath!
Those were awful times. Yet I have heard many of the older Negroes say
the old days were better.
Such talk always seemed to me but an expression of sentiment for some
good old master, or else the older Negroes were just too handicapped
with ignorance to recognize the benefits of liberty or the
opportunities of freedom.
But I've always been proud of my freedom, and proud of my old mother
who faced death for her freedom and mine when she escaped from the
Bradford plantation a long time before freedom came to the Negro race
as a whole.
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