Millie Williams

Millie Williams was born in the spring of 1851 on Joe Benford's place in Tennessee. Her mother was Martha Birdon; her father, she was told, was Milton Wade, whom she never saw. As a baby she was sold away with her mother, then taken back by Benford, and she never saw her mother again. Benford kept her in his "slave yard," a cluster of filthy shacks where he held the people he traded. The keeper there beat them with a club rather than a whip, she said, because a club didn't leave scars that would lower their price.

At about seven she was put on the auction block in town and bought by Bill Dunn. She remembered children sold to one man and their parents to another, and the crying, and that women with many children brought higher prices. When Union sentiment rose in Tennessee and Dunn refused to take a loyalty oath, he fled to Texas with Millie and Sallie Armstrong and traded them to Tommy Ellis for land. Ellis held about fifty people, and Millie worked in his house. She once hid a stolen chicken, pot and all, under the bedclothes when the mistress came sniffing. She remembered the songs "Massa sleeps in the feather bed, nigger sleeps on the floor; when we gets to Heaven, there'll be no slaves no more," and "Wish I could go hunting, but I ain't free."

She lived in Fort Worth from the 1870s on, and when interviewed at 86 she lived at 1612 East Fourth Street.