Martha Jackson

Martha Jackson was born in 1850 and was interviewed by Ruby Pickens Tartt near Livingston, Alabama. She remembered that enslaved people could not go even to church without a pass, and that patrollers chased those who did through the woods "like deer." She knew a man named Dan who hid nearly a year in a cave dug into a clay bank just up the road and never showed himself in daylight until after the surrender. A house servant named Tishie ran away from cruel treatment and was hidden in the grain house by other enslaved people until patrollers came one night and took her away. Martha never saw her again. A boy on Martha's place had wanted to marry her, but marriage across plantations was allowed only if one enslaver bought both, and they never agreed.

She said one patroller fathered several families of children by enslaved women, and the light-skinned girls were sent north when they were old enough for field work, she supposed so he would not see his own children beaten. A relative's overseer made people plant corn in exact checks and forced them to eat any seedling that didn't come up straight, raw, stalk and all. When patrollers claimed to find papers suggesting an uprising, he nearly killed people, set dogs on those who fled, and ordered them brought back "dead or alive."