Gus Johnson

Gus Johnson was born in Marengo County, Alabama, near Demopolis, to August and Lucinda Glover, enslaved by Betty Glover. He said his grandparents came from South Carolina and had been brought from Africa by ship, and that his family was long-lived: a brother died at 102, another at 104, and his father at 99. During the war, thirty-six of them were shipped to Texas in a boxcar, by way of Meridian and Houston, to Sunnyside, about 18 miles west of Houston, where they cleared 150 acres of woodland for farming. Union cavalry they passed on the way told them they would be taken to Cuba and sold.

He remembered weekly rations of salt bacon, meal and sorghum; a nursery where the children were kept safe from wolves and panthers; snow in that first Texas winter; and an underground jail with a weighted trapdoor that the mistress used to punish people. When Texas conscripted plantation men for the war, his father was made to choose the able-bodied men, including Gus's brother Keen, who came back safely. At freedom the mistress gave each man $500, in Confederate money.

At 18 he married Lucy Johnson, who had died long before. He had five living children but had lost track of them; one son served in World War I. When interviewed he lived alone in a small lean-to in the north end of Beaumont, Texas, spending his days in his vegetable garden.