Geo. Simmons

George Simmons was born in Alabama in 1854 and brought to Texas as a child during the war. He was enslaved by Steve Jaynes near Beaumont, who held about seventy-five other people on a 400-acre cotton and corn plantation. George was too young for field work and ran errands around the house.

He remembered cornbread, black-eyed peas, and roast possum with sweet potatoes, and that the enslaved were allowed small gardens of their own. They had their own church on Sundays with an enslaved preacher, Sam Watson. He knew from neighboring places that some enslavers beat people nearly to death, and that runaways were tracked with dogs and sometimes made to wear bells chained on so they could be heard in the woods.

He saw ragged Confederate soldiers walking home after the war, and Union soldiers in blue with canteens over their shoulders. After freedom, he said, people stayed on because they had nowhere to go and no way to get food or shelter. He remembered the Klan coming to his father's house: a robed man demanded water and seemed to drink three full buckets, until they realized he was pouring it into a rubber bag under his robe to frighten them. In the late 1930s he lived in Beaumont.