James West

James West was born in 1854 on William West's farm of about a hundred acres near Ripley, in Tippah County, Mississippi. The enslaver held James's mother and four others: Buck, Sam, Rufus and Mary. James never knew his father.

He remembered two-room cabins with real windows, Sam and Rufus playing fiddle and banjo for parties, and home-cured ham. As a boy he was given a goat, and the shoemaker made a harness and cart so he could haul kindling and water. He laughed remembering the day a bee stung both him and the goat and sent the cart flying downhill.

The farm was close to the fighting around Corinth. Soldiers stopped to water their horses, and James hid whenever they came. When the cannons began one morning during a two-day battle, he crawled under a shed and stayed there without food or water until noon the next day. Afterward he and Buck walked the battlefield, which was covered with dead horses; the soldiers had already been buried in trenches. He remembered a song about outrunning the patrollers.

He stayed with the West family until he was twenty-one, then worked for various people. He married in Tennessee at twenty-two and had one son, but his wife left with the boy when he was five and he never saw them again. He came to Texas around 1885 and was living in Fort Worth when interviewed.