Green Cumby

Green Cumby was born in Henderson, Texas, enslaved by the family of Robert H. Cumby, and was about fourteen when the war ended. His grandfather, Tater Cumby, was the Black overseer for forty people and called everyone out at four in the morning; they worked sun to sun and often on Sundays. White overseers whipped with straps, and with no jails, people were chained to trees.

He saw speculators drive long lines of enslaved people past the plantation to market, women carrying babies and bedded down at night on the roadside "like cattle." Children of seven or eight or younger were sold away from their mothers, which, he said, is why so many Black families still did not know their kin. He remembered a slave-catcher named Henderson who kept sixty bloodhounds and rented them out. Green himself was chased by patrollers many times while slipping off to see a girl on the next plantation, but they never caught him. He got so he could run nearly as fast as a rabbit.

The best times were corn shuckings, when no pass was needed. The white children taught him a little reading at night. His enslaver went to war as a Confederate officer, and once Green understood the fight was about freedom, he said it felt like heaven on earth to imagine it, because even a good master "ain't the same as being free." After the war he stayed four years, then married and settled in Tyler, where he worked thirty years at the cotton compress. When interviewed he lived with his daughter at 749 Mesquite Street in Abilene.