Penny Thompson

Penny Thompson was ten when the war began. She was born in Coosa County, Alabama, enslaved by Calvin Ingram, whose father had given her parents to him as a wedding present. Her mother bore fifteen children, but Penny never saw any of her brothers and sisters, because they were born on the elder Ingram's plantation before her mother was given away. On Ingram's place of 200-some acres and about twenty enslaved adults, her mother was chief cook for the big house, and Penny helped her, fed the chickens, gathered eggs and carried water.

She called Ingram the kindest man that ever lived and said his wife "sure was a devil"; they fought often over how the enslaved were treated, and he would not let her abuse them. There was no whipping on the place, but on the neighboring plantation, where people were traded constantly, she heard them bellow under the lash and saw babies sold from their mothers and wives from their husbands. She remembered the morning and evening prayers, the corn-husking bees where finding a red ear won a nip of peach brandy, and broomstick weddings with cedar boughs dusted in flour. Once, before a party, the enslaver gave her a new pink dress, and she cried for joy; everyone said she looked like the Queen of Sheba.

After freedom most stayed until Ingram died. In 1867 Penny was brought to Tyler, Texas. She married Bill Thompson but divorced him after fifteen years because he wouldn't work. When interviewed at 86 she lived at 1100 East 12th Street in Fort Worth.