Cato Carter

Cato Carter said he was 101 years old, since he was twenty-eight when slavery ended. He was born in Alabama on the Carter plantation, which covered 1,500 acres and held more than eighty enslaved people. His mother, Zenie Carter, was enslaved; his father, Al Carter, was a brother of the enslaver, Oll Carter. Because he was "of their blood," the family took him into the big house as a small child, gave him his own room, promised never to sell him, and dressed him in fine clothes. His grandmother was part Choctaw, and his grandfather was a diver who was lowered by rope into the Alabama River to recover goods from wrecked boats.

His privileged position did not stop him from seeing the cruelty around him. He carried thread to nursing mothers who were forced to spin seven or eight cuts a day or be whipped, and saw babies brought to the big house every morning for inspection, because, he said, there was money tied up in enslaved children. He worked in the tannery where the whips were made, and saw men and women tied to stakes and whipped, sometimes for half a day to force a confession.

He hunted squirrels, deer and bears, and remembered the great herds of deer moving west as Native people were driven out. In his old age he lived in Dallas with his wife. He still rode the truck to the cotton fields every day, too old to pick, to sit and watch over the other workers' lunches.