Millie Ann Smith

Millie Ann Smith was born in 1850 in Rusk County, Texas, enslaved by George Washington Trammell, a pioneer planter and the county's largest slaveholder. Trammell had bought her mother and three older children in Mississippi and brought them to Texas, leaving her father, who belonged to a man named Moore, behind. Before Millie was born, her father ran away, made his way to Texas, and persuaded Trammell to buy him so he could be with his family. Her grandfather, Josh Chiles, came to Texas when Rusk County was "just a big woods" and spent two years as the plantation hunter. He spoke several Native languages, had pierced nose and ears, and would slip off to live with Native people for weeks, who hid him and told searchers, "No see him." He also built all the beds, for the big house and the quarters alike.

She remembered the overseer checking at nine each night that everyone was in bed, and the young men being locked in a log house at night and on Sundays to keep them from roaming. Only one man on the place, George Wood, could read and write, taught secretly in the woods by a white boy from the next plantation. They held prayer meetings in secret and hummed religious songs while working, which, she said, was their way of praying to be free. They made medicine from horsemint, butterfly weed and Jerusalem oak.