Horace Overstreet

Horace Overstreet was born near Marshall, Texas, to Jennie and Josh, enslaved by a lawyer named Hall, whose large plantation held hundreds of people. Hall bought more every year and employed both a white overseer and a Black driver; people were tied down and whipped for what was called disobedience. Horace was raised around the house as a favorite. The cabins had almost no furniture, field clothes were made of cotton-sack cloth, and children went without shoes.

At Christmas and on the Fourth of July there were dances, with banjo pickers, the "Swing de Corner" and the chicken wing. Anyone who danced without a permit risked 150 lashes from the patrollers, and he laughed remembering how fast people scattered when the patrollers appeared. He also told of a woman given a bag of sand by a conjurer as protection from whipping; she felt so safe that she talked back to the enslaver, who whipped her so hard the bag split in two, "and dat ruint de conjure business."

He saw Union soldiers, so dirty he could only make out their uniforms in spots, take charge of the court in Marshall. When freedom came, the enslaver offered to pay those who stayed, and most did through the harvest, since they had nothing. Afterward some worked for white families and some sharecropped. Horace worked wherever he could. "It was harder'n bein' de slave at first," he said, "but I likes it better, 'cause I kin go whar I wants." He moved to Beaumont as a young man and lived there the rest of his life.