Charley Mitchell

Charley Mitchell was born in 1852 in Lynchburg, Virginia, enslaved by Nat Terry, a traveling Baptist preacher, and his wife Julia. His father was sold when Charley was a baby. His mother was hired out in town as a cook and house servant, and Charley was hired out as a nurse for white families' children. During the war he worked in a bakery run by a northern-born man named Tom Thurman, making hardtack and doughnuts for Confederate soldiers.

He received no schooling. He said enslaved people who taught themselves to write their initials in charcoal on barn doors were threatened with having their fingers cut off if caught. He described Woodruff's slave-trading yard in Lynchburg, with an auction stand in the middle, where buyers from Louisiana and Texas purchased people and led them away handcuffed and chained. No one wanted to be sold to Louisiana, where he had heard the beatings were the worst. The town had patrollers and a fenced whipping post for anyone caught without a pass.

He remembered General Lee's camp near Lynchburg and the Union troops who occupied the town after the surrender. Afterward the freed people were called to the fairgrounds and told they were free, with nothing promised. A year later a free school for Black children opened in the old barracks with four teachers from the North. Charley worked in a tobacco factory for a dollar a week, then as a waiter. In 1887 he moved to Panola County, Texas, and farmed in the Sabine River bottom for fifty years. In old age he lived with his children.