Elbert Hunter

Elbert Hunter was 93 when Mary A. Hicks interviewed him at Method, North Carolina, in May 1937. He was born in 1844 on Jacob Hunter's plantation eight miles from Raleigh, to Stroud and Lucy. His brothers were Tom, Jeems and Henderson, and his sisters Caroline, Kinjline and Ann. His mother was the cook and his father a field hand. Before the war he carried water and tended the sheep, cows and geese.

He remembered patrollers catching him and his sister Caroline on an errand, and the young master, Knox Hunter, riding up and ordering them off the property. As children he and Caroline once found a free man's half-full whiskey jug while fetching the cows, and he drank until he passed out; the enslaver carried him home and lectured him, and he said he never drank again. When Union troops approached, he and the enslaver hid the cattle and horses in the swamp for days. When he came back, soldiers were shooting the livestock, and he saw them cut hams from living animals and leave them groaning. His mother cooked for the soldiers all day. An officer who stayed the night lost a pocketbook holding seven greenback dollars, the first paper money Elbert ever saw.

He said they were glad to be free, even with kind enslavers, because the work ran from daybreak to dark and the women had to card and spin every night. The cruelest thing he ever saw was after slavery, when the sheriff whipped a Black man at the pillory in Raleigh until he bled.