Clara Brim

Clara Brim believed she was about a hundred years old when interviewed. She was born on William Lyons's plantation in Louisiana, a place then known as Plaquemine Bouley, where about twenty families were enslaved. Her parents, Becky and Louis Brim, had come from Virginia and worked in the fields. She had two sisters, Cass and Donnie, and a brother, Washington, who was taken away during the war to work for the army and never came back. No one ever learned what happened to him.

She said Lyons, a bachelor, ate the same food as the people he enslaved, called the field hands in during the heat of the day, and ran the place himself without an overseer. Work was assigned as weekly tasks; those who finished early could hire themselves out for pay. The enslaved attended the white church, sitting in the back, held their own weekly prayer meetings led by an older man, and were allowed gardens, pigs and chickens of their own. Lyons gave passes so the patrollers, who rode the roads in groups of about six, would not catch and whip people.

By the war years she was fully grown and did every kind of field work the men did: plowing, pulling fodder and picking cotton. She said the hardest work she ever did came after freedom. She stayed with the Lyons family a long time after the war. She married once; her husband had been dead about forty-one years when she was interviewed. In 1913 she moved to Beaumont, Texas, to live with her youngest daughter.