Frank Menefee

Frank Menefee was 84 and still healthy when he was interviewed in Opelika, Alabama. He was born at Loachapoka, Alabama, to Susan and Monroe Menefee, who were enslaved by Willis and Hannah Menefee near Robertson's Mill. His siblings were Patsy, Sally, Lula, Mary, Melvina and Philmore. His mother's parents, Muton and Patsy Footman, had been brought from Meridian, Mississippi, and sold for $3,500. His father was a shoemaker who made shoes from cowhide, sometimes with the hair left on.

The plantation covered seven or eight hundred acres. A conch shell woke everyone before daylight. He said that one man was slashed so badly he died the next week, that they often plowed all night by lanterns tied to the plows and picked cotton all night to get it to the gin by morning, and that workers clearing new ground wore chains on their ankles. Marriages were made by jumping the broom, without a preacher.

He was baptized at eleven and remembered Saturday-night dances, cake walks and corn-shucking songs. He was proud that he had never been inside a jail, never stolen, never cursed and never drunk whiskey in his life.