Amy Chapman

Amy Chapman was born on May 14, 1843, on Governor Reuben Chapman's place five miles north of Livingston, Alabama. Her parents, Clary and Bob Chapman, had come from Petersburg and Richmond, Virginia, "driv' down to Alabamy lak cattle." The governor and his wife lived mostly in Huntsville, and the white overseers treated people terribly.

She said one overseer stripped women and whipped them, until the governor's wife, Felicia, confronted him and ordered him off the place. That same overseer had chained Amy's oldest brother with his arms stretched out "like you see Christ on de cross," and Amy sat on the ground beside him and cried all night. He was the first to put her in the field, and he whipped her naked with a cat-o'-nine-tails. She said she had been hunted by dogs herself but would not talk about it. She told of a neighbor, Uncle Tiptoe, who had been put in the stocks, beaten until he bled, and rubbed with red pepper and turpentine. She also told of an enslaved woman, nearly beaten to death, who took terrible revenge on her enslaver's family.

She was baptized in Jones Creek long before the war and could still sing the hymns she loved. "I kin tell you things about slavery times dat would make yo' blood bile," she said, "but dey's too turrible. I jus' tries to forgit." In old age she tended her garden near Livingston, was crippled after a cow dragged her through her orchard, and asked the interviewer to write her son in Texas to come fix her leaking roof if he wanted any more of her star quilts.