Abram Sells

Abram Sells was born on the Rimes Plantation, about 18 miles southeast of Newton, Texas, in the area later called Harrisburg. He did not know his age. When interviewed he lived at Jamestown, Texas. His great-grandfather, Bowser Rimes, had been brought to Texas from Louisiana; his grandfather John lived to 103; his father was Mose Rimes and his mother was named Phoebe. In the year of freedom he was inherited by a man named Sells who had married into the Rimes family, and that is how he got his name. He and others were about to be shipped to the new owner's plantation in Louisiana when the end of the war stopped the trip.

He described a childhood watched over by his great-grandfather, who kept a rabbit's foot, fish scales and a small dried turtle in his pockets and used them to conjure. The enslaved children were fed together from a wooden trough with wooden spoons, mostly potlikker from greens, potatoes and beans, supplemented by rabbits his great-grandfather trapped and possums the dogs treed. Boys and girls wore the same long white shirt that turned gray with wear, homemade deerskin shoes in winter, and hats plaited from longleaf pine straw.