Virginia Newman

Virginia Newman did not know her age but remembered seeing the stars fall, the great meteor shower of 1833, when she was about six: "They cross de sky like a millions of firebugs." Her birth name was Georgia Turner. Her father, George Turner, was a free Black man who captained a cargo vessel with living quarters aboard, sailing as far as Africa; she was born on his boat below Franklin, Louisiana. One grandmother was a free woman brought from Africa, said to come from a ruling family; another was Native American and raised Virginia and her siblings in a log cabin deep in the woods. One grandfather was a Mexican man known as Old Man Caesar.

In the woods they slept on saplings and moss, ate whatever they could hunt, including stewed rattlesnake, and baked hoecakes wrapped in cabbage leaves in hot ashes. When she was a big girl, the family told her she could stay in the woods free or go live among white people. She chose to apprentice herself to the family of a Governor Foster at Franklin, where she nursed him when his leg was crippled. She married Beverly Newman from the Lewis plantation in Opelousas; her status from then on was tied to the plantation system.

When fighting reached Louisiana, the white families fled to Texas with the people they held. The walk from Bayou Lafourche to the Brazos bottoms took almost a year; Virginia carried her two small sons, Jonah and Simon, through mud, cold and rain, barefoot, with her feet blistered for months. They settled in Jasper County. After the war her family was broken up, and her three oldest children never saw the younger ones. She had nine more children after slavery. Widely believed to be over a hundred, she lived in Beaumont, Texas.