Siney Bonner

Siney Bonner was born on John Bonner's plantation near Pickensville, Alabama, on the Tombigbee River. Her mother told her she was about fifteen at the time of the surrender. Her father, Green Bonner, had been bought in Mobile for a thousand dollars; the enslaver said he paid enough greenbacks to wrap him in, and named him Green. As a girl she rode along when her father took the wagon to the landing to meet the steamboat and bring back sugar, coffee and plow tools.

On Sundays everyone went to Big Creek Baptist Church, with a big dinner spread on the grass by the graveyard. When enslaved worshippers tried to hold their own shouting meetings under a brush arbor, the enslaver stopped them. She loved telling how she tried to sell a litter of puppies to a local doctor: one week she told him they were Methodist pups, the next week Baptist, "because they got their eyes open since then."

After the surrender the enslaver gathered everyone and told them they were free and could stay and work or leave. Her father stayed until he died. Siney later worked at the Phoenix Hotel in Carrollton. She told of a Black man named Bill Burkhalter who was accused of burning the old courthouse and was taken from officers by a mob and hanged in the Sipsey River swamp, and of the local belief that his face afterward appeared in a window of the new courthouse. She was living in Birmingham when interviewed.