Mary Reynolds

Mary Reynolds said she was more than a hundred years old when she was interviewed at the Dallas County Convalescent Home, blind for five years and very frail. She was born on Dr. Kilpatrick's plantation at Black River, Louisiana. Her father, Tom Vaughn, was a free man from the North who built and tuned pianos in New York and Chicago and came south looking for work. He met her widowed mother, Sallie, offered all the money he had to buy her and her three children, was refused, and married her anyway, working the fields alongside the enslaved. They had six daughters: Martha, Pamela, Josephine, Ellen, Katherine and Mary.

Mary was born at the same time as the enslaver's daughter Sara, whose mother died, so the two babies nursed together and grew up playing together. When Mary was small, Kilpatrick sold her cheap to a lonely old man in Trinity so Sara wouldn't play with a Black child. Mary sat on his floor all day with a doll he bought her, frightened in the dark. Sara wasted away crying, "I wants Mary," until a doctor warned she would die, and Kilpatrick had to pay much more to buy Mary back.

"Slavery was the worst days was ever seed in the world," she said. "I got the scars on my old body to show to this day." She saw men and women locked naked in stocks and whipped by the driver, Solomon, while the enslaver watched, cut nearly to the bone; some never got up again. The dead were buried the same day in a bent plank, too shallow to keep the buzzards away, and there was no time to mourn. She hated most picking cotton with frost on the bolls until her hands cracked and bled, and she would sneak a stolen sweet potato into the field fire. Solomon didn't allow praying, so they prayed in the cabins with heads down low and sang under their breath.