I wasn’t looking to find a story of abounding love when researching violent episodes of Texas history. Then I ran across a Texas newspaper article that shed a brief light on the lives of a Black woman and a Mexican man who had lived as husband and wife in the 1840s, twenty-five miles northeast of Victoria, Texas. She was a woman forced to live in bondage in Jackson County, near the town of Texana, in present day Edna, Texas. Her husband was a Mexican man who was likely indentured, employed, or a peon in that same vicinity.
The report, unsurprisingly, did not fully document their lives, experiences, or bonds of intimacy. It did, however, document a glimpse of two lives whose stories and relationship often go untold in the archive. This glimpse and the many questions the source delivered compelled me to further explore this couple’s relationship and harrowing flight to freedom. As a historian whose work investigates the experiences of enslaved and free Black women, men, and children who sought freedom across transnational frontiers, I wanted to learn more about this couple. I was interested in knowing more about the woman and her origins. Was she born enslaved in Texas? How long was she held in bondage near Texana? Had she tried to run to freedom before? What was her trade? How many languages did she speak? The archive has a history of silencing the Black experience and Texas has historically engaged in a disconcerting suppression of its Black past. Answers to my many questions, therefore, proved daunting tasks that led me to creative ways to study this couple’s narrative. I turned to investigate the environment and history of the geographic localities where this woman was held in order to learn more about her life, what she may have witnessed, and her tragic journey to freedom.
The region where this courageous Black woman was held enslaved had been largely inhabited by Tonkawa and Lipan Apache tribal communities up until the 1830s, when they were unsettled by a group of Anglo colonizers who arrived as part of Stephen F. Austin’s Old Three Hundred colonization program. In 1832, these Anglo-settlers led the Sandy Creek assault against the native communities living in the area and destroyed remaining Tonkawa and Lipan Apache settlements. Six slave holding families, originally from Alabama, consolidated power over the area. These six families redeveloped the region’s agricultural, cattle, and trading industries through the labor of the people they held in bondage. Was this fearless Black woman brought enslaved from Alabama? Was her family forced to move to Texas alongside her? How did she come to meet the Mexican man? It is likely that she was forced to toil in both sugar and cotton crops, staples that turned high profits in Jackson County during that time. Perhaps she may have worked in any of the many groups of enslaved people who packed, prepared and carried the products of said crops to the local port on the Lavaca River. She may have played a central role in the trade that was sent out weekly on the steamboat that ran from Texana, through the pass of Matagorda Bay, to other parts of Texas, Louisiana and the Gulf South.