Betty Robertson's Life in Slavery

Former slaves recalled Webbers Falls events better than any other Muskogee County location. Ethel Garrison interviewed a former slave named Betty Robertson when Robertson was 93 years old. Betty's account of the Rich Joe Vann farm sheds interesting light on life before and after the Civil War. Here are some of the details from Betty's recollections.

Betty said, "I was born close to Webbers Falls, in the Canadian District of the Cherokee Nation, in the same year that my pappy was blowed up and killed in the big boat accident that killed my old Master." The boat was the "Lucy Walker" that Rich Joe Vann was racing on the Ohio River on its second voyage. The boiler on the steamboat over heated and exploded October 25, 1844. Betty was born that year.

Shortly before the Civil War, Betty worked in the plantation's big house. "Some of the Master's family was always going down to the river and back, and every time they come in I have to fix something to eat. Old Mistress had a good cookin' stove." This surely was a cast iron stove that controlled the heat better. Most Cherokees cooked in open fireplaces, she reported.

According to Betty, "I got all the clothes I need from old Mistress, and in winter I had high top shoes with brass caps on the toe. In the summer I wear them on Sunday, too." Another former slave recounted in a different interview that his master took shoes away from slaves in March of the year. The owner stored the shoes in a shed until the following fall. At that time, owners gave shoes back to the slaves after they had worked barefooted in the fields all summer long. Slaves universally wore hand-me-down clothing.

Betty gained her freedom after the Civil War ended. "One day young Master come to the cabins," Betty recalled, "and say we all free and can't stay there less'n we want to go on working for him just like we'd been, for our feed and clothes. Mammy got a wagon and we traveled around a few days and go to Fort Gibson. When we get to Fort Gibson they was a lot of negroes there, and they had a camp meeting and I was baptized. It was in the Grand River close to the ford, and winter time. Snow on the ground and the water was muddy and of pieces of ice. The place was all woods, and the Cherokees and the soldiers all come down to see the baptizing."

Betty mentioned that she had been wearing her high top shoes on Sundays during the summer. In all likelihood, Betty went to church for nearly fifteen years without being allowed to join. One of the privileges of emancipation was the freedom of being baptized.

The Union soldiers at Fort Gibson impressed Betty. She remembered them singing "Hang Jeff Davis to a Sour Apple Tree." Betty did not know who Jeff Davis was. Nor could she recall that "Hang Jeff Davis to a Sour Apple Tree" was only a verse in the song entitled "John Brown's Body." The song made such a strong impression on her, however, that Betty remembered the verse for over seventy years.

She also recalled the soldiers saying that Jeff Davis "used to be at Fort Gibson one time." That was true. Lt. Davis arrived in December 1833. He resigned his commission in March of 1835, in order to marry the daughter of a colonel. Soldiers stationed at Fort Gibson at the end of the war remembered Davis' service thirty years earlier as they talked among themselves and with the new freedmen.

There are more stories in Betty's recollections. They are part of one interview out of a hundred and thirty collected in "The WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives." This book is available for checkout at the Muskogee Public Library.

Oklahoma Slave Narratives

Ethel Mae Wolfe Garrison was the daughter of Mitchell and Inez Wolfe. She was born in 1900 and lived to the age of 103 years. Born in the Manard Community, she lived quietly in the Muskogee and Cherokee Counties all of her life.

The Great Depression, however, forced many Americans into occupations or situations removed from their normal lives. Such was the case for Ethel's experiences.

During the mid-1930's, the Federal Writers' Project undertook the goal of recording the recollections of elderly Americans. Stories of peoples' lives from every station of life made it into over ten thousand sketches. These sketches were the first systematic recording of oral history.

Interviewing former slaves was only a part of a much larger project to demonstrate that Americans were a diverse people. In Oklahoma, the general stories make up the famed Indian-Pioneer Papers. These interviews preserved much of Oklahoma's early history.

The Oklahoma Historical Society filed the "slave narratives" separately from the Indian-Pioneer interviews. They remained filed with the papers of the Federal Writers' Project in Oklahoma City for administrative reasons. They first appeared in print only eleven years ago. Altogether, one hundred and thirty Oklahomans recounted their experiences as slaves for FWP "reporters," today called interviewers.

Ethel Garrison became one of these interviewers in 1937. She was the lone Native American out of the ten people assigned to conduct interviews of former slaves in Oklahoma. Her industriousness resulted in the preservation of thirty-two sketches, a fourth of the total recorded.

She traveled only a short distance for most of her interviews. Ethel conducted seventeen interviews in Muskogee. She found another ten of the former slaves in Fort Gibson. The remaining homes she visited were in Hulbert, Gibson Station and Colbert.

Project managers instructed its reporters to make repeated visits in order to build up a sense of trust. The fact that Ethel worked for the Federal Writers' Project told everyone that she was struggling financially like most everyone else. That status helped her bond with her subjects.

When she began making notes for the sketches, her bosses wanted her to get the story the way it was told. The stories were to be recorded as nearly as "word-for-word" as possible.

Sweetie Ivery Wagoner of Muskogee was the youngest ex-slave Ethel interviewed. Sweetie was born the year the Civil War ended. This was the "year of freedom." Sweetie thought she was born that year or the year before. Her mother was not sure.

George Kye was the oldest interviewee Ethel visited. He was an adult when the conflict began between Northerners and the "Sesesh," as he called Southerners. His accounts of a slave's perspective are the strongest despite his claim of being a hundred and ten years old.

A decade ago, I talked with Ethel about interviewing her. I wanted to learn more about her experiences. I hoped she could recall something from that time. The first time I called, she was feeling ill.

Months later, I called once more. Again, I was unable to schedule a time for us to meet. However, she sent a copy of a transcript of an ex-slave's interview for me to pass on to the Three Rivers Museum. It is now a treasured artifact from the Federal Writers' Project effort.

If you would like to read all of the Oklahoma's ex-slave narratives, a published version is in the Muskogee Public Library under the title of "The WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives." It is fascinating reading.