Orelia Alexia Franks

Orelia Alexie Franks was born on February 22, George Washington's birthday, near Lafayette, Louisiana. She did not know the year, but believed she was nearly ninety. She was enslaved by Valerian Martin, a French Canadian cane and cotton planter, and his wife, Halite Guidry. Her father, Alexis Franks, was Creole; her mother was Fanire Martin. She grew up where everyone spoke French and said she spoke French better than English. She was baptized at St. John's Catholic Church near Lafayette, though she later joined an Apostolic church.

She remembered log cabins chinked with mud, an elderly enslaved woman who served as nurse, and a meal called coosh-coosh: cornmeal boiled in salted water and eaten with milk, clabber or syrup. The enslaver kept a separate graveyard for the enslaved, where a Black Methodist preacher held funerals, and gave them a large cabin for prayer meetings. At Christmas there was a big dinner, and after sugar-making the children got the leftover syrup from the pots for candy pulls. When the old enslaver died, she said, the priest came and candles were lit, and everyone cried.

She saw Union soldiers "so many like hair on your head." During a battle near the house, she and other children climbed a tree to watch, hearing bullets zoom past without realizing what they were, until a man on horseback told the enslaver to get the children down before they were killed. She lived in Beaumont, Texas, for many years.