Tom Wilson

Tom Wilson was 84 and still farming his own plot near New Zion Church in Mississippi, on what had been the old Jim Wilson place where he was born. His parents, Caroline and Jeff Wilson, were enslaved by Jim and Nancy Wilson. His mother had been brought from Tennessee and sold for a thousand dollars; she was a big, strong woman who could plow like a man all day and then milk twenty cows. His father was bought off the block for nine hundred. As a house boy, Tom helped clean and wash dishes. In the evenings the white family sat on the porch and made the Black children dance and sing for their amusement, and fed them from a trough of cornbread soaked in milk or molasses, "as much went in our hair and eyes and ears as went in our mouths."

At Christmas the enslaver let them rest as long as a Yule log burned, so they found the biggest gum log and soaked it in the creek so it would last nearly a week. No one could read or write until after freedom. He saw his mother and many others whipped laid across a barrel with a leather strap on a staff. When his father ran away, bloodhounds caught him, and he was whipped across the barrel from sunup to sundown until he could barely speak above a whisper.

He remembered playing in the front yard when a column of Union cavalry about a mile long came down the road. The white family ran for the woods, and a soldier put his bayonet to Tom and demanded to know where the potato house was.