Albert Hill

Albert Hill was born enslaved on Carter Hill's plantation in Walton County, Georgia, a place with about 50 enslaved people. His father took the surname Dillion from his own owner, Tom Dillion, whose plantation was next door and who also owned Albert's mother and her 13 children. On Saturday nights the young people slipped over to the Dillion place to dance to fiddle and banjo, staying far in the back where the white family couldn't hear.

As a boy he carried secret notes, hidden in a hollow stump, between his enslaver's daughter Mary and Bud Jackson, a young man her father opposed. After the war her father relented and let them marry. When freedom came, Albert stayed on for $7 a month, clothes and board until he turned 21. Then he left for Robinson County, Texas, without telling anyone. He worked at paving and hostling and handled freight for the Santa Fe railroad until he grew too old to work.

Nearly 40 years later he went back to Georgia and found Mary peeling apples on the back porch. She told him she had a whipping waiting for him for leaving without a word, and they spent the whole day talking, laughing and crying. When interviewed at 81 he lived in a five-room house at 1305 East 12th Street in Fort Worth, above the Trinity River.