William Stone

William Stone was born in a covered wagon on the road from Alabama to Texas, about two years before freedom. His parents were Louis and Caroline Stone, enslaved by Lem Stone, whose plantation near Montgomery, Alabama, had been raided by Union troops who burned the house and cotton and killed the livestock. The enslaver brought some of the people he held west, first to Rusk County, Texas, and then to Shreveport, where they stayed until freedom. William was too young to remember slavery himself and told what his parents had told him: cotton hidden in pens deep in the brush and slipped to the gin at night, and Sunday preaching under a big oak tree.

He grew up in Louisiana and worked along the Mississippi River, hauling cane to the boiling mills in trains of twenty wagons on the sugar and long-staple cotton plantations. He sang the work songs from those days, including one about a pound of meat eaten on Monday and molasses for the rest of the week. He said after freedom the plantations still ran much as before, with mostly Black overseers who paid in rations on Saturday nights and did not whip.

He described the river's beauty in fall, when the wild geese came, and its danger in flood, when people woke to a roar like thunder and ran for the levees and higher ground. In old age he lived in Mart, Texas, on an old-age pension.