Francis Black

Francis Black was born about 1850 on the Carlton plantation at Grand Bluff, Mississippi. When she was about five, she and another girl were playing in the road when three white men grabbed them, threw them into a wagon and covered them with quilts. When one threatened to kill her if she didn't stop yelling, she answered, "Kill me if you wants to, you stole me from my folks." She never saw her family again.

The men took the girls to the New Orleans slave market and cut Francis's hair to pass her off as a boy, but she told buyers she had been stolen, and they could not sell her there. They took her to Jefferson, Texas, and sold her to Bill Tumlin, who ran a livery stable and bought her, his son told her, for $200, "for to play with me." She lived in the house, minded the two children, set the table standing on a chair, and pulled the fly brush during meals. On Tumlin's farm she saw the overseer buckle men across a log and whip them. She remembered the great fire in Jefferson that destroyed the livery stable.

After freedom she stayed until she was grown, then worked around town and married Dave Black. They moved to Cass County and raised six children, but she eventually left him and supported herself. She lost her sight about a year before she was interviewed and was living at the Ragland Old Folks Home at 313 Elm Street in Texarkana on a $10-a-month pension.