Millie Randall

Millie Randall was about six when peace was declared. She was born in Mississippi and spent most of her childhood on Dan and Laura McMillan's farm at Bayou Jacques, beyond Big Cane, Louisiana, in deep woods country, where the enslaved people grew corn, cotton and rice and cleared new ground by digging stumps and moving logs. Her mother was named Rose; she knew nothing of her father.

"All us white folks was mean, I tells you the truth," she said. She saw people beaten and nearly killed on their own place by "old, bully, mean overseers," and thought she escaped only because she was too little. She heard of Union soldiers who found a planter hiding between his mattresses and ran their swords through it, and of soldiers breaking open a store and telling the enslaved women to take what they wanted, which they carried off in their gathered skirts.

After freedom, the enslaver refused to let her mother have her children back. He put Millie and her brother Benny in a wagon and drove them around and around so they couldn't be found, until her mother got a justice of the peace to make him turn them loose. "Was we glad to see her." She later married at Big Cane and had three children, all of whom had died. When interviewed she lived in Beaumont, Texas.