Simon Walker

Simon Walker was born at Forsyth, Georgia, enslaved by Col. Hugh Walker, who held more than a hundred people; his parents had belonged to the Walkers before him. Each of the colonel's eight sons had a body servant, and Simon belonged to the youngest, Jim, whom he walked to school and played with in the woods. All the sons but Jim joined the Confederate army. Simon remembered the sad day the son called Chap was brought home with one leg shot off, and fanning flies from him through the long hot days while he lay near death.

He never forgot the day Sherman's army marched through the plantation: more men than he had ever seen at once, all in the same uniform, tramping into the big house and turning everything inside out looking for silver and jewelry the mistress had hidden in the woods. They took the hams, burned the smokehouse, the barn and the cotton piled by the gin house, and swapped their worn-out horses for the good ones, but hurt no one, not even the cook who went after them with a broom. When freedom came, the colonel told everyone from the veranda that they were free, and most stayed until he died.

After that Simon drifted, and in 1888 he came to Birmingham, then little more than muddy roads and swamps. He carried mortar for the city's first brick store and later worked 25 years for the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company.