Adline White

Adline White was born in Opelousas, Louisiana, enslaved by a doctor named Bridget and his wife. Her parents, Thomas and Amelia Narille, had been born in Virginia. She had four brothers and two sisters.

She remembered the Bridgets as cruel. Both husband and wife beat the children and adults alike, set hounds on them, and tied people across barrels or staked them out with ropes to be whipped. Food and clothing were scarce. The family lived in a log cabin with a stick-and-mud chimney and worked all day in the horse-powered cotton gin and sugar mill, with no parties or free time. In the evenings they sang quietly so the white family would not hear.

During the war the enslaved people crept into the woods at night for prayer meetings, praying for freedom to come quickly, knowing they would all be whipped if discovered. When freedom came, the enslaver offered pay to anyone who stayed, but most left. She married twice, first to Eli Evans in Jennings, Louisiana, with whom she had six children, and later to James White. In old age she lived with her daughter Lorena in Beaumont, Texas.