Louise Mathews

Louise Mathews was eleven when slavery ended. She was enslaved by the Rev. Robert Turner, whom everyone called Judge Turner, a Baptist preacher who also kept a small farm, a general store and a saloon, and preached to Black and white congregations alike. Her father belonged to a neighbor, Jack Hooper, and came over twice a week, when her mother cooked him a meal. Turner performed marriages himself, she said, while most couples elsewhere simply lived together by agreement. Children were fed well with clabber, milk and potlikker, and dosed with Turner's homemade medicine of whiskey, cherry bark and rust from nails. She hated it.

She remembered surrender day: Turner coming into the yard with his hands clasped behind him and his head bowed, telling them he hated to give them up, not because he didn't want them free, but because he didn't want to lose them. Everyone left. Her family went to her father's place and in 1872 moved to the spot in Fort Worth where she still lived, when there were no other houses there.

She married Henry Daggett in 1874; he died in 1884. In 1885 she married Jim Byers, who walked out on Christmas morning, "the only present he ever gave me." Her last husband, Bill Mathews, died in May 1937. She had seven children, four of them in Fort Worth. When interviewed at 83 she lived alone at 2718 Ennis Avenue, a block from her younger sibling, Scott Hooper, and said the two of them were a consolation to each other.