Bill Crump

Bill Crump was 82 when Mary A. Hicks interviewed him in the State Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina. He was born in Davidson County on the plantation of Whitman Smith, who enslaved his mother. His father, Tom, belonged first to Ben Fairry and later to Jimmy Crump, in neighboring Randolph County. His siblings were Alt, George, Harriet, Sarah and Mary.

He said no one among the dozen or so enslaved people on his place was whipped, and that they had chickens, a pig and gardens of their own. His father was a fiddler who played for dances at the nearby Cross Roads village, and passes were needed to get past the patrollers. He watched people sold many times from a table in front of the Cross Roads post office, to whoever bid highest. He told a story of a wake where the "dead" man sat up on the cooling board and sent the mourners running.

After the war he stayed on four or five years and went to school for two weeks under a teacher from the North. At the time of the interview he had served nearly five years of an eight-to-twelve-year sentence for killing a man who, he said, had followed him down the road threatening to kill him after a quarrel at a gambling party.