Betty Simmons

Betty Simmons believed she was 101 or 102 years old. She was born in Macedonia, Alabama, enslaved by Leftwidge Carter, while her father was a free man whose former enslaver had given him a horse, a saddle and a little house. When Carter's daughter Clementine married Nash Langford, Betty was given to her. She remembered being happy there, and once, while minding a little boy, getting drunk on whiskey from a barrel hidden under the bed, popping out to say "Boo" to make him laugh.

Langford's store failed, and to keep his creditors from seizing the people he enslaved, he secretly sold some of them. Betty was tricked into a buggy with a promise of temporary work at a boardinghouse. At a crossroads, Langford, unable to look her in the eye, handed her and a man over to slave traders, who hid them in the buggy. They were taken by train to the traders' yard in Memphis, then with 253 others by the steamboat Ohio down the river to Vicksburg, and on to the great trader yards of New Orleans. She never saw her family again. She described people kidnapped off the roads and sold, guarded in the yards so they could not escape into the swamps.

Colonel Fortescue, a Mexican War veteran, bought her and took her to Liberty, Texas, where he let people farm their own patches. She married George Fortescue, who was later killed by a falling tree; she never remarried. She saw a runaway boy hunted with dogs and thrown into a horse pond for the dogs to attack. Mothers had one month after giving birth before returning to the field, and children were sent to the field as young as three. She had about fourteen children, seven of whom were living when she was interviewed in Beaumont, Texas.