Andrew Moody and wife Tildy

Andrew Moody was ten when freedom came and was said to be the oldest person born enslaved in Orange County, Texas, still living there. He grew up on Colonel Fountain Floyd's plantation of about 250 acres on Lacey's River, seventeen miles from Orange, a town he remembered being called Green Bluff and then Madison. About forty people there were old enough to pick cotton. His grandmother was with him, but not his mother; his father, Ball, belonged to another family.

He described homemade furniture with rawhide chair seats cut from the heads of slaughtered cattle. A minister named Pipkin sometimes preached in the quarters, and some of the enslaved could read the hymns because the enslaver's daughter had taught them. He noted that enslaved people's names were recorded in the church book alongside the white family's, and counted by the tax collector like property. Christmas brought a two- or three-day holiday, small gifts, dancing and a big dinner. When someone died, work stopped the next day, a horn was blown, Uncle Bob prayed and sang, and people sat up all night with the body.

Freedom was announced at noon on a June day in 1865 in Duncan Woods. His mother stayed until Christmas, then left with her husband. Andrew stayed on, the last of the formerly enslaved to remain, and hunted and fished the Neches River with the former enslaver. He was photographed with his wife, Tildy.