My grand-nephew, Christopher, wanted to write something about someone interesting in our family. He heard that my grandfather, Alexander Thompson, had been a circus performer. So, he and his mother searched the internet looking for information about him. They found nothing on Alexander but my niece kept searching for the names of other family members. She found a website called Texas Slave Narratives. On that website she found Betty Simmons’ slave narrative and there was a photo of Betty with the narrative. Betty Simmons was a former slave. She was stolen from Alabama and sold to a new slave owner in Texas. They had slave rustlers back then just like the old west had cattle rustlers. Betty ended up in Beaumont, Texas where she settled after emancipation.
The Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 contain more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves. Thanks to the Library of Congress we all have online access to them. Many of the narratives are written in what is known as dialect. The federal writers wrote what they heard. They are difficult to read for some people. If you’ve ever read the dialect poems of poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar, you have an idea of what these slave narratives are like. Of course, Dunbar was a brilliant African American poet. So too, those who gave these narratives are brilliant in their own right having survived slavery in America.
Betty Simmons, my great-great-grandmother, died in 1941, the year before I was born. She was 108 years old. I always knew about her from my mother. I used to think to myself, "One more year great-great-grandma ... had you lived just one more year we would have lived briefly together." Never did I dream that I would actually read five pages of words spoken by her.In 1986 our family held a family reunion in Silsbee, Texas at the home of my aunt, Fannell Moffett. Silsbee, TX is 21 miles north of Beaumont, TX. My aunt Mayetta Thompson Reed, who is the eldest living person on my mother’s side of the family, gave us a lot of family genealogy and history. We learned that my grandfather, Alexander Thompson, the former circus performer, used to walk a tightrope while blindfolded. She talked about her great-grandmother, Betty Simmons, giving us the names of Betty’s children. One of Betty’s children was Mittie who was my mother’s and Aunt Mayetta’s grandmother. To us, finding this narrative by our ancestor was so very exciting. And we also have a typed account of Aunt Mayetta’s family genealogy and stories. It’s a link to our past that we probably would not have without online access. (Ironically or is it the work of the Holy Spirit, Dora, my wife handed be a piece of paper titled, "Family History told by Mayetta Thompson Reed to Tyrone Monro." She found it while spring cleaning and handed it to me while I was typing this article.) Tyrone is my brother-in-law. It was written immediately following the family reunion. When my son, Raymond, tried to find Betty online, he found the full length photograph of Betty Simmons you see here.
Now, my family members are logging onto Ancestry.com and similar websites, setting up accounts and getting excited. What happens during these searches is sometimes you may be searching and a distant relative is also searching. Somehow the two of you link up as my niece tried to explain to me.
I’m just so happy that my six grandchildren will have the opportunity to pass on a narrative spoken by their great-great-great-great-grandmother, and two photographs of Betty Simmons … former slave. <>
