Lizzie Hill

Lizzie Hill was 94 and living with a niece in Eufaula, Alabama, where she had moved about twenty years earlier from the Spurlock plantation four miles out. Until recently she had worked as a laundress, her "wash woman" trade. She was nearly grown when freedom came. She was enslaved by Richard Cozier and his wife, Everlina, and grew up as a playmate to their two young daughters, sleeping on a pallet in their room and eating what they ate.

After freedom her mother moved to Hobert and took her along, but Lizzie ran away and walked the fourteen miles back down the big road at night, running most of the way. She did it three times, and each time her mother came and took her back to work in the fields. Before freedom she had worked only in the house, never in the fields. Both girls married, the Coziers moved to Texas, and she never saw any of them again. She said she had a hard time working in the fields after the war.