La San Mire

La San Mire was 86 and living in the Pear Orchard settlement near Beaumont, Texas, when he was interviewed in French, the language he had always spoken. He was born May 12, about ten years before the war, on Prosper Broussard's plantation between Abbeville and Crowley in Louisiana. His father was a Spaniard who spoke Spanish and French; his mother, the enslaver and everyone around him spoke French. The enslaver was a Creole.

He said the old master was cruel: he made people lie on the ground to be whipped and often whipped La San's mother, and La San hid so he wouldn't have to watch. During the war he drove an ox cart collecting dead soldiers for burial after a battle about forty miles away. Marriages were made by jumping the broom before witnesses, with little cakes but no celebration; there were round dances on Sundays, and healers called traiteurs treated the sick with herbs.

They were freed on the Fourth of July, he said, and he stayed on, working in the house and bringing coffee to the family in bed each morning, while catching and selling wild horses at night. At 21 he married, first before a judge and then with a priest's blessing, in a new suit he had bought with his own money.