Pauline Grice

Pauline Grice was born on John Blackshier's plantation near Atlanta, Georgia, where about 150 adults and 50 children were enslaved. She was too young to work until near the surrender. Blackshier told his overseer that if he couldn't make people work without the whip, he wasn't the man for the job. Instead, people who disobeyed were locked without food in a small "jail," and once or twice someone was sold. Meals were cooked by three women and served at long tables in a shed. The plantation made nearly everything it used, and she remembered workers heading out each morning "like the big factory," whistling and singing "Old cotton, old corn, see you every morn." At Christmas the children blew up hog bladders and burst them in the fire for fireworks.

The enslaver's two sons, about seventeen and eighteen, joined the Confederate army, and a year later he went too, leaving the plantation to an overseer. First Confederate soldiers took mules, horses and corn, then Union soldiers took the rest. The last year of the war they went hungry, and once she heard cannon booming for two days nearly without stopping.

She married Navasota Grice in 1875, and they moved to Texas in 1917. After his death in 1928 she depended on friends, and when interviewed she lived with them at 2504 Ross Avenue in North Fort Worth, mostly confined to bed.