Wes Brady

Wes Brady was born on John Jeems's place on the old Jefferson Road in Harrison County, Texas, and spent his whole life farming there. His father, Peter Calloway, had been brought from Alabama with his whole family by slave traders. His mother was Harriet Ellis. He had two brothers and four sisters.

He was frank about why he was telling the truth: "Some white folks might want to put me back in slavery if I tells how we was used in slavery time, but you asks me for the truth." The overseer had the hands in the field by three in the morning on rows a mile long, and anyone who left a sprig of grass was beaten nearly to death. Cotton was weighed by candlelight. Workers got fifteen minutes to eat. He described brutal punishments: people staked to the ground and beaten raw, one man given fifteen hundred lashes for taking a meat bone. Children were beaten if seen playing with eggshells. He saw long lines of enslaved people chained together and driven down the Jefferson road. Once the overseer broke an old man's neck in a fit of anger.

As a small child he cried through the quarters looking for his mother, whom he saw only on Sundays; at night he would wake to see her cooking a little mush in secret. Church sermons told the enslaved to obey and not steal, "but nary a word 'bout havin' a soul to save." His father went to the war as a servant and never came back. In old age Wes lived with friends on the Long's Camp Road on an eleven-dollar monthly pension.