Charlotte Beverly

Charlotte Beverly was born in Montgomery County, Texas, the mother of eleven children in her own later life. Her father, Strawder Green, was enslaved by a Colonel Hughes, and her mother, Phyllis, by Captain Pankey, who held about forty people. Charlotte worked in the house. Among her jobs were scrubbing the mistress's gold snuffbox twice a week and keeping the silver and china shining.

She remembered her aunt cooking persimmon bread in the fireplace, and that the enslaved were allowed an extra cotton patch they worked by moonlight and could sell for their own money. They attended the white church, standing by the door to sing if they couldn't get in. An enslaved preacher was sometimes allowed to preach, but had to preach with a tub over his head because he grew so loud. Charlotte's job included blowing the horn twice a day to call nursing mothers in from the fields to feed babies kept in as many as fifty cradles at the big house.

During the war she knitted socks for soldiers by moonlight. She was married by a Union soldier in Huntsville, in a white tarlatan dress with a wreath of tiny white flowers, on the same day her sister married her husband's brother. Her husband gave her a gold ring and a cup and saucer. In old age she lived with one of her children on the highway between Cleveland and Shepherd, Texas.