Tom McAlpin

Tom McAlpin was born on a sunny day in June 1844 at Mardisville, five miles southwest of Talladega, Alabama, enslaved by Dr. Augustus McAlpin, who kept a small plantation of about a hundred acres and twelve enslaved people while he practiced medicine in town. Tom's job was minding the children, Black and white, and his favorite fun was hitching the donkey, Sut, to a wagon full of children and riding him all the way into Talladega. He got exactly one whipping, "with all the trimmings": told he'd be whipped if the enslaver caught the hogs in the corn again, he sewed one stubborn hog's eyelids shut, and the punishment, he said, was the only lesson he ever needed.

Patrollers never caught him because he was so fast he could hold a horse's tail and keep up with it around the pasture. He made baskets and sold them in Talladega on Saturday evenings for fifteen cents to buy tobacco or chocolate, and he picked up what learning he could from the white children's books while carrying them to school. He remembered Confederate officers rounding up white men in the streets with ropes around their wrists for conscription, and soldiers hiding horses and ammunition in the old Masonic Institute in Talladega.

When interviewed, past ninety, he lived at 1928 Avenue D in Birmingham, alert and vivid in his memories.