Walter Calloway

Walter Calloway was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1848. Before he was old enough to remember much, he, his mother and an older brother were sold to John Calloway at Snowdoun, ten miles south of Montgomery, Alabama. By ten he was a regular plow hand. The overseer, Green Bush, had a powerful Black man named Mose do the whipping, and Mose whipped a thirteen-year-old girl so hard she nearly died and suffered seizures ever after. That made the enslaver angry enough to run the overseer off. A preacher named Joe, bought along with Walter's family, held Sunday services in a brush arbor in the pecan grove, and the people preferred him to the white preacher.

His fifteen-year-old brother drove the ration wagon to Montgomery and one day came back saying "Hell done broke loose in Georgia"; soon after, Jefferson Davis was inaugurated on Goat Hill. When word came that Wilson's Union raiders were near, the mistress sent Walter galloping on a mule to warn a neighbor, but the soldiers reached the plantation first, ransacking the big house, taking the best stock and burning the smokehouse, barns and cribs.

"They tell us we's free," he said, "but Lordy, Cap'n, we ain't never been what I calls free." He still had to work just as hard, sometimes for less than they had before. For 25 years he worked for the Birmingham street department. When interviewed at 89 he lived alone in a neat cabin off Avenue F on Birmingham's south side, sick and hoping a doctor would come.