Harriet Jones

Harriet Jones was born in 1844 near Clarksville, in Red River County, Texas, one of eight children of Henry and Zilphy Guest, whom Martin Fullbright had brought from North Carolina. The plantation raised corn, oats, wheat, cotton and livestock and shipped cotton by wagon and bayou boat to Jefferson, and from there to Shreveport, Memphis and New Orleans.

When Fullbright died, his enslaved people were divided among his heirs, and Harriet passed to his daughter, Ellen, whom she remembered as an angel. She dressed Ellen's hair for her wedding to Johnnie Watson and described the gown in loving detail, and cried because her young mistress had grown up. Harriet worked in the house, learned to knit socks and mufflers that she traded in town for groceries, cooked, and waited on the table when guests came for days at a time. She looked back on those years as the happiest of her life.

She could still sing the old songs about baking hoecakes, the field hands' song about the frosty morning, the race to the dinner horn, and the possum-hunting rhymes. She remembered hunting turkey, prairie chickens, coons and possums along the river, and decorating for Christmas with holly, evergreens and candles at Miss Ellen's request. Her parents stayed with the family until their deaths. She was ninety-three when interviewed.