Mary Thompson

Mary Thompson was fifteen when she was freed. Her mother, an Askew, and her father, Wesley Jones, were enslaved by different men; her father belonged to Green Askew, a Georgian. She said the enslaver whipped her more than once with a cowhide and several times grabbed her by the ears and knocked her head against the wall, though she called her treatment generally good. His wife's niece kept a regular whipping post on her plantation.

She remembered enslaved people being fattened "like hawgs" and then marched through town and auctioned off like cattle, some bringing more than a thousand dollars in New Orleans. She saw hounds track down a runaway who kept crying out, "O Lawd." After the war, she said, many freed people wandered with nowhere to go, and many died of measles alone in the woods.

She stayed in the enslaver's house eight months after freedom, then hired out for ten dollars a month, her first money. She was so proud of earning it that she chose work over school and never learned to read or write. At sixteen she married General Thompson, who had been enslaved in Alabama, at a Fourth of July celebration. They came to Texas, where he farmed on the Brazos, and they had eight children, two of whom were living when she was interviewed. After his death she lived about eight years with another man who would not marry her, and then left him. She lived in Austin, Texas.