Star Creek Papers

Forty Acres and a Mule

Forty Acres and a Mule This page intentionally left blank Chapter One FREEDOM COMES TO ISOM WILSON som Wilson was just a shirt-tailed boy when they brought him to Washington Parish. The year must have been close to 1835, for Isom was a grown man when the surrender came in 1865. His father's real name, if he had one, was Will Ward, because Ward was the name of the Virginia planter who started out from St. James County, Virginia, with Will, and Martha, and their child Isom.1 Will Ward, so Isom's mother told him later, was a native African. Perhaps that was why he was so stubborn about leaving Virginia for Louisiana, when his master decided to sell them all down in the Southwest . Will couldn't have known that his master had to sell his slaves or his land, on account of the Tidewater land being worn out from planting tobacco and corn year in and year out for two hundred years. At any rate, Will didn't want to leave Virginia, and he sulked. Mas'r Ward paid no attention to his sulking, aside from giving him twenty lashes the second day out from Richmond. The third day out Will acted particularly stubborn. So Mas'r Ward staked him out, spreadeagling both legs, his head, and one arm. Mercifully they left one arm free so that he could keep the steel collar from choking him to death in the night. They brought him food in a wooden bowl, and water in a blue glass jug. It rained all that night. The next morning, when Mas'r Ward went to unchain Will, he found that he had broken the blue glass jug into little pieces. He kicked and beat Will, but Will didn't say a thing. They chained him by his collar to the end of the wagon where little Isom and his mother were riding. Mas'r Ward was careful about the slaves 87 I 88 The Star Creek Papers while he was taking them overland; Martha was going to have another baby, and little Isom rode in the wagon with her because Mas'r Ward didn't want him to look puny from walking two thousand miles when they go to Louisiana. Every now and then he would make little Isom get out and walk alongside the wagon for exercise. On the day after the night when they had staked Will out, the slave caravan had gone about ten miles when Will fell down behind the wagon. Mas'r Ward let the wagon drag him a little while, and then he rode back behind the wagon to see what was the matter with Will. He thought he was malingering again, but when he looked at his face, he saw that something was really the matter with Will. Will was worth fifteen hundred dollars in Louisiana, and so Mas'r Ward put him in the wagon with Martha and little Isom and let him ride. Will wouldn't eat anything, and he wouldn't say anything. Mas'r Ward thought he was just another surly black brute. Louisiana would take that out of him. Louisiana never had the chance. By the time Will died, in a day or so, Mas'r Ward discovered that Will had broken that blue glass jug on purpose, and ground up some of the pieces against his steel fetters. Then he had swallowed a handful or so of the blue glass powder. When Mas'r Ward finally got to Louisiana, he sold Martha and her expectant baby and Isom to a planter who had two plantations, one on the Bogue Chitto River, just across the state line from Mississippi, and the other up on the Red River in North Louisiana. Martha and Isom were sent to the place on the Bogue Chitto. In 1859, when Isom was about eighteen years old, one of his master's relatives bought him for $1500.00, and gave him to Hezekiah Magee for a wedding present.2 Hezekiah Magee was one of a number of planters who lived along the river valley of the Bogue Chitto. The plantation was located in Washington Parish. Washington Parish is one of the sub-divisions of the old Spanish province of West Florida, and the entire section of Louisiana east of the Mississippi is included in what were once known as "The Florida Parishes...