Katie Darling

Katie Darling was born in 1849 on William McCarty's plantation on the Elysian Fields Road, nine miles south of Marshall, Texas. "You is talkin' now to a nigger what nussed seven white chillen in them bullwhip days," she began. Her mother died in slavery. Her father escaped while traveling with the enslaver toward the Battle of Mansfield and joined the Union army. She had three brothers, Peter, Adam and Willis.

She slept on a pallet in the big house, cared for the children, and with another girl named Violet milked more than a hundred cows, starting by five in the morning. She said the enslaver whipped people for poor work and, if the work was good, found another reason. People worked all day Saturday and sometimes Sunday, had no shoes, and the mistress told them they were made to work for white people. When someone died, the enslaver built the coffin and sent two men to bury the body with no singing or praying allowed. He paired couples himself, without their choice.

During the fighting near Mansfield, cannon fire tore up the fields. Katie remembered the mistress telling her the enslaved would never be free, then turning pale at the sight of a Union soldier with a pistol in the doorway. The McCartys kept Katie working for about six years after the war, and the mistress still whipped her. When she was threatened with a hundred lashes, her brother Peter came at night and took her away to live with him. She later married and farmed in Marshall. Her husband and three children had died by the time she was interviewed, and she was cared for by Griffin Williams, a homeless boy she had taken in and raised.