William Walters
State: Oklahoma Interviewee:
Walters, William
Many Ann (that was my mother) was owned by Mistress Betsy, and
lived on the Bradford plantation in Belaford County, Tennessee,
when I was born in 1852.
State: Oklahoma Interviewee: Walters, William
My drddy, Jim Walters, then lived in Nashville, where my mammy
carried me when she ran away from the Mistress after the Rebs
and Yanks started to fight. My daddy died in Nashville in 1875.
State: Oklahoma Interviewee: Walters, William
We were runaway slaves. The slipper-offers were often captured,
but Mary Ann and her little boy William (that's me) escaped the
shary eyes of the patrollers and found refuge with a family of
northern sympathizers living in Machville.
State: Oklahoma Interviewee: Walters, William
Nashville was a fort town, filled with trenches and barricades.
Right across the road from where we stayed was a vacant block
used by the Rebs as an emergency place for treating the wounded.
State: Oklahoma Interviewee: Walters, William
I remember the book of cannons one whole day, and I heard the
rumble of army wagons as they crossed through the town. But there
was nothing to see as the fog of powder smoke became thicker with
every blact of Sesesh cannon.
State: Oklahoma Interviewee: Walters, William
When the smoke fog cleared away I watched the wounded being carried
to the clearing across the road - fighting men with arms shot
off, legs gone, faces blood smeared - some of then just laying
there cussing God and Man with their dying breeth!
State: Oklahoma Interviewee: Walters, William
Those were awful times. Yet I have heard many of the older Negroes
say the old days were better.
State: Oklahoma Interviewee: Walters, William
Such talk always seemed to me but an _expression of sentiment
for some good old master, or else the older Negroes were just
too handicapped with ignorance to recognize the benefits of liberty
or the opportunities of freedom.
State: Oklahoma Interviewee: Walters, William
But I've always been proud of my freedom, and proud of my old
mother who faced death for her freedom and mine when she escaped
from the Bradford plantation a long time before freedom came to
the Negro race as a whole.
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