Charity Grigsby

Charity Grigsby was sewing a quilt and humming an old plantation hymn when she was interviewed in her cabin about nine miles from Livingston, Alabama, on the old Epes road. Her father was Daniel Grigsby and her mother Mary Moore, and they were enslaved by Jim Moore near Ramsey Station above Sumterville, on a small place with about a dozen enslaved people and no overseer. She was a strapping girl during the war and worked in the house spinning and weaving. She said she was at least 85 and probably older.

She remembered the slave-catchers' dogs kept by a nearby planter, Ervin Lavender, and a brutal driver named Sanders on a neighboring place. When a nursing mother refused his advances, he threatened her. Soon after, his own gun went off while he was loading it in the wheat field and killed him. The frightened workers ran, and the dogs were set on them, mauling some badly. Enslaved people on her place were not allowed to go to school, to corn shuckings, or even to prayer meeting.

She was the mother of eleven children, five of whom were living, and she lived with two of her daughters, Mattie and Evie.