Josie Brown

Josie Brown was born on Christmas Day, about 1859, in Victoria, Texas, "just in time for the eggnog." She was six the Christmas before freedom. Her mother, Sylvia, was a freeborn Choctaw woman who had been kidnapped and sold by a speculators' gang. Her father, Reuben, worked in the fields growing rice and tobacco. They were enslaved by George Heard, and when Josie was a month old the family moved near Tyler and later Woodville. Her mother nursed her own thirteen children and her mistress's seven, and worked as the weaver. Her brother Bob went off to Mansfield with the young master and was never heard from again. An uncle in Polk County wore earrings and beads, and she remembered him as Native.

She remembered sitting on the rail fence to watch the stagecoach pass with its four or five horses and bugle, and being kept indoors because of bald eagles, wildcats and bears. Church meetings had to be held in the yard so the white family could hear what was preached. She never was abused herself, she said, but she saw children too small to walk sold off the block in Woodville "just like calves," and people in handcuffs. After freedom they were made to work a whole year before a Union officer came and forced the white family to turn them loose.

She married at fifteen in a real wedding with a veil and a long, shining dress. Her second husband was Robert Brown. She raised ten children of her own, plus six or seven orphans she found on the street. When interviewed she lived in Woodville.