John James

John James was born on John Chapman's large plantation in East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana, where about fifty Black families, more than a hundred people, were enslaved. He took his surname from his father, who was owned by a man named John James and who died of a stomach ailment before John could remember him. John lived in a ten-by-fifteen-foot dirt-floored cabin with his mother, two siblings and an aunt. He remembered the plantation nursery, where an old woman named Jane watched the babies while their mothers worked, and the children crowded around big pans of cornmeal mush and milk with wooden spoons "like little pigs." The adults ate breakfast by pine-knot torchlight before daybreak.

One day the bell rang and everyone was called to the front gallery, where Chapman read from a long paper that they were slaves no more. Most stayed for wages or shares. John and his mother remained six years, and at about thirteen he and a friend, off the plantation without a pass, were caught by night riders the local people called whitecaps and made to run for their lives.

He later moved to Missouri and worked twenty years for the M.K.&T. Railroad before coming to Texas. When interviewed he lived at 315 South Jennings Avenue in Fort Worth.