Spence Johnson

Spence Johnson was born around 1859 in the Choctaw Nation, Indian Territory, near Boggy Depot. His mother's family was Choctaw, and she spoke only Choctaw. When he was about three, his family was washing clothes by the river when men in a carriage stopped as if to rest their horses. One lured the older children over with candy, and when the younger ones followed, the men seized his mother, struck her on the head, and dragged her into the carriage as she fought and screamed. They drove across the Red River into Louisiana.

In Shreveport they were sold at auction. His mother and her three children brought $3,000; her two stepchildren were sold elsewhere. They were bought by Riley Surratt, whose plantation straddled the Texas-Louisiana line and had a factory, gins and a quarter-mile row of cabins. His mother cooked for the family and was always afraid of being stolen again. Spence remembered ox-wagon trains hauling cotton to Shreveport. He told of a neighboring white man who repeatedly sold an enslaved man named John to distant buyers and then stole him back to sell again, until John was found dead in a swamp.

He and his mother stayed with Surratt until Spence was about sixteen. After Surratt died, he came to Waco in 1874 with the Surratt family and lived there the rest of his life. He married and had six children. He attended school only one day and never learned to read or write.