Sarah Ashley

Sarah Ashley was born in Mississippi. A slave speculator named Henry Thomas bought her family and broke it apart: her father was sold to a man in Georgia, and Sarah was put up on an auction block in New Orleans. "I scairt and cry," she said, "but dey put me up dere anyway." She and her two sisters traveled for a long time in the speculator's drove before Mose Davis of Coldspring, Texas, bought them, about four years before the war, as he was buying young children.

She worked in the cotton fields and had to pick 300 pounds a day and carry it a mile to the cotton house. Anyone who fell short was whipped until blisters rose, and then struck again with a paddle drilled with holes to break the blisters. Salt and red pepper were rubbed into the wounds. Prayer meetings were forbidden in the quarters, so people slipped away at night to camp meetings. Rations were a peck of cornmeal and a few pounds of bacon for one or two weeks, and people kept a box under the fireplace for the food they took to survive. She saw a captured runaway jump through a glass window to escape.

She was nineteen when freedom came in June. The enslaver gave each person a bale of cotton and some corn and asked them to stay, but no one did. She sold her cotton for about fifty dollars, lent it to a man who never paid it back, and then cooked for a storekeeper who promised five dollars a month and paid her only in food and clothes. In old age she lived alone in Goodrich, Texas.