Excerpt from interview with former slave Felix Haywood, age 92, of San Antonio, Texas, “Like Freedom Was a Place”  Felix Haywood, born into slavery in St. Hedwig, Texas, was one of thousands interviewed for the Slave Narrative Collection of the Federal Writers’ Project.

The end of the war, it come just like that—like you snap your fingers. . . . How did we know it! Hallelujah broke out—

Abe Lincoln freed the n*****

With the gun and the trigger;

And I ain’t going to get whipped any more,

I got my ticket,

Leaving the thicket,

And I’m a-heading for the Golden Shore!

Soldiers, all of a sudden, was everywhere—coming in bunches, crossing and walking and riding, Everyone was a-singing. We was all walking on golden clouds. Hallelujah!

Union forever,

Hurrah, boys, hurrah!

Although I may be poor,

I’ll never be a slave—

Shouting the battle cry of freedom.

Everybody went wild. We all felt like heroes, and nobody had made us that way but ourselves. We was free. Just like that, we was free. It didn’t seem to make the whites mad, either. They went right on giving us food just the same. Nobody took our homes away, but right off colored folks started on the move. They seemed to want to get closer to freedom, so they’d know what it was—like it was a place or a city. Me and my father stuck, stuck close as a lean tick to a sick kitten. The Gudlows started us out on a ranch. My father, he’d round up cattle—unbranded cattle—for the whites. They was cattle that they belonged to, all right; they had gone to find water ‘long the San Antonio River and the Guadalupe. Then the whites gave me and my father some cattle for our own. My father had his own brand—7 B)—and we had a herd to start out with of seventy.

We knowed freedom was on us, but we didn’t know what was to come with it. We thought we was going to get rich like the white folks We thought we was going to be richer than the white folks, ’cause we was Stronger and knowed how to work, and the whites didn’t, and they didn’t have us to work for them any more. But it didn’t turn out that way. We soon found out that freedom could make folks proud, but it didn’t make ’em rich.

Did you ever stop to think that thinking don’t do any good when you do it too late! Well, that’s how it was with us. If every mothers son of a black had thrown ‘way his hoe and took up a gun to fight for his own freedom along with the Yankees, the war’d been over before it began. But we didn’t do it.  We couldn’ help stick to our masters. We couldn’t no more shoot ’em than we could fly. My father and me used to talk bout it. We decided we was too soft and freedom wasn’t going to be much to our good even if we had a education.

Source: reprinted in Botkin, B.A., ed. Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery.  Delta, 1989, 231. (Document 4.7.2)