Margrett Nillin

Margrett Nillin was about ninety when interviewed and a young woman when the war began. She was enslaved by Charles Cornelius, who had a small farm near Palestine, Texas, and held only four people: Margrett, her mother, her sister and a cousin. Her father had been sold before she was born, and she never saw him. Their cabin had no window, only a hole with a swinging shutter.

She belonged to the mistress, who let no one else give her orders. She sewed, knitted, fanned flies away, fetched water and snacks, and combed the mistress's hair and rubbed her feet at night. She said she could not remember a cross word, and that the worst punishment on the place was scolding, though a neighboring enslaver whipped people terribly. Her mother had premonitions, saying she had seen angels in the night before someone died. During the war, the only sign of it on the farm was that sometimes there was not enough to eat.

After freedom she saw the Klan whip a neighbor named Johnson. She and her mother moved to Chambers Creek and made their living sewing. She later married Ben Nillin, who died about fifteen years before her interview, and lived with her son Tom in Fort Worth. Asked whether she preferred slavery or freedom, she said that in slavery she owned nothing and had no worries, while in freedom she owned her home and raised her family with all the worry that came with it, "but I takes de freedom."