Lou Williams

Lou Williams was said to be the oldest resident of San Angelo, Texas, and at 108 she was still a familiar figure about town on her crutch. She was born in 1829 in southern Maryland, in a three-room frame house, enslaved by Abram and Kitty Williams, who held, she said, about 800 people on a thousand acres. From age eight she was nursemaid to the family's children, and she liked to take them to the creek, spread her underskirt on the bank for them to sit on, and fish. As a small girl she saw the stars fall, and her mistress told the children to get on their knees and pray.

The enslaver took the children to town, she said, to show them how other slaveholders auctioned off husbands, wives and children, and how the families cried when they were sold. Her mother was Native, from the Black Creek people. When the enslaver bought Lou's father and the children, her mother had already been sold away from them. She followed them to the plantation crying and begging to stay, and was allowed in to do mending, saying, "Thank God, I'll get to be with my husband and little children." She became a valued spinner and weaver.

A neighboring planter kept overseers with lead-tipped bullwhips. Lou heard people screaming until they could only grunt, and saw blood on the ground after rain, and people driven past to the fields at three in the morning with tin ovens on their heads cooking their breakfast. Her brother William was killed in the war. After the war she cooked in Louisiana for several years before coming to San Angelo.