Henry Garry

Henry Garry was born just after the war ended, so he was never enslaved himself. He was born in the backyard of what became John Rogers's place in Sumter County, Alabama. His mother had been enslaved by the Vandegraaf family there and worked as the plantation seamstress, making clothes for Black and white alike. His father, Daniel Grady, had come from Virginia long before the war. Both parents stayed on the plantation until they died, and they were faithful members of the little log church that was still holding services when he was interviewed.

As a small boy, he was sitting under a tree with his family one evening when about a hundred robed riders on robed horses galloped up. The leader rode to the well and ordered Henry's father to draw him water, then drank three full buckets and claimed it was his first drink since he was killed at Shiloh, a common Klan trick meant to frighten people. No one in the quarters dared go out for a week. The next day they learned the riders were Klansmen, and that a white man from the North named Billings, who had been telling freedpeople they had been promised forty acres and a mule, had been found hanged from an oak near Grand Prairie.

When interviewed he was living in Birmingham, wearing a patched gray suit, and on his way to the courthouse to try to get a troublesome nephew out of jail. Twice a year he visited a cousin, nearly a hundred, who still farmed a few miles from Gainesville.