Zek Brown

Zek Brown was born into slavery on Green Brown's farm in Warren County, Tennessee, where six enslaved families lived. His mother worked the loom making cloth. He remembered the food, ham, bacon, cornbread and dark molasses, and said he could still smell the ham frying. He said the enslaver rarely whipped anyone.

After the war his family stayed one more year, then moved to a farm of their own. His father farmed and his mother, who had been taught to read as a girl, became a schoolteacher. When Zek was about ten, he gave his sister a haircut that went badly wrong, and his mother whipped him for it. Angry, he ran away for what he meant to be a few days, and fell asleep in a covered wagon in a neighbor's yard. He woke up with the wagon moving. It belonged to Sam Bragg, who was bound for Texas. Too far from home to send him back, Bragg took him along to Birdville, Texas, in 1868. Zek never saw his parents or sisters again.

He worked four years for Bragg and then for wages on farms around Fort Worth, farming most of his life. He told of being arrested once while walking with a man accused of theft, and said he served six months on a chain gang for something he knew nothing about. He married once, about forty years before his interview; his wife died four years later. They had no children. In the late 1930s he lived on West Bluff Street in Fort Worth.