Memories of Henrietta Butler, Formerly Enslaved

Interior view of a room with a rotunda ceiling during an auction of slaves, artwork and goods.William Henry Brooke, 1772-1860/Courtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection

This week, we’ve been running a series called “Dispatches from New Orleans,” featuring work from writers and artists who come from or live in one of the most unique cities in the country. We had planned to run this series earlier, but this moment of punctuated social upheaval driving change gave us reason to pause the series. We wanted to give space to the protests, and allow people the opportunity to contribute to the series in the aftermath of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and the protests.

As a result, we rescheduled our series to this week, which happened to coincide with the week of Juneteenth.

Our original plan was to pause the series today in recognition of Juneteenth. But as we considered the circumstances, we realized that there was an opportunity to say something more resonant as part of the “Dispatches from New Orleans” series. New Orleans is, after all, a central location in the history and narrative of the north American slave trade. It is the place that people found themselves when they were sent “down river.” It is the place where the enslaved congregated on Sundays in Congo Square, giving rise to the rhythms and themes that would evolve into jazz and blues. It is a city whose legacy is comprised of notorious brutality as well as some of the earliest freedmen societies in the country. In short, New Orleans is a city whose place in Black history is simultaneously a legacy of its harshest atrocities and its highest achievements.

The authors we have published this week are an assemblage of New Orleanian natives and transplants, but the voice that is impossible for us to capture today is the voice of those who experienced the brutality of slavery first-hand, and who understood from personal experience that emancipation was an achievement far bolder than national independence. It was an achievement that marked one of the first great victories of the Civil Rights movement in the United States, and of the human rights movement worldwide.  

In trying to find some way to memorialize that legacy, we decided that the best way to refute those fighting for the preservation of a false confederate history would be to share the words of someone whose life was marred by the south’s true legacy.

Between 1936 and 1938 interviewers working on behalf of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) collected more than 2,300 interviews with people who were formerly enslaved living in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and Louisiana. Those interview transcripts, along with and more than five hundred black-and-white photographs of interviewees, comprise the largest collection of primary source materials from individuals who lived and toiled under the system of American slavery. 

We searched the archives of Louisiana State University and found the transcribed oral history of Henrietta Butler, a formerly enslaved who was interviewed in her eighties while living in Gretna, Louisiana, on the West bank of the Mississippi across from New Orleans.

These narratives are problematic—transcriptions of Black formerly enslaved people written primarily by white southerners. Interviewers were told that "truth to idiom be paramount, and exact truth to pronunciation secondary."

It is a difficult piece to read, but there is also a brutal honesty in Butler’s account, a bitterness toward those who enslaved her and a lack of faith in the government that codified her admittedly limited freedom.

Our hope is that Henrietta Butler’s account, even through all the shortfalls of transcription and layers of interpretation, will resonate as a moving account of a woman who was once treated as property and subjected to indignities no being should face. Setting aside this introduction, we leave this account to speak for itself.

Henrietta Butler
Gretna, La., 1940

“Ise eighty some years ole, born at La Fouche, my Ma’s name Easter – dat her picture over dare. I was born in slavery. Ise not ashame’ to tell it either, an’ known somethin’ about it.

“My dam ol’ missus was mean as hell. You see dis finger here? – dare is where she bit it de day us was set free. Never will forgit how she said “Come here, you little black bitch you!” and grabbed my finger – almos’ bit it off. Her ole name was Emily Haides. When she found out we was goin’ to be free she raised all kind of hell; de Bose could do nothin’ at all with her. She had two big saddle horses – one name Canaan, the other name Bill. She got on ole Bill and come to New Orleans few days befo’ us was set free, en’ when de Bose fetched her back she was in a black box. He buried her in de field – he didn’ have no respec’ for her she was too mean. I know ever night I had to wash dat ole woman’s feets an’ rub dem fo I could ever go home to bed.

I knows the day dem sojer’s came in, taken’ all de meat out of de smoke house, got all de chickens an’ turkeys. She raised hell with the Boss an’ tol’ him to run dem son of bitches away. He didn’ say air thing to dem sojers ‘cause he was too scared.

“She made me have a baby by one of dem mens on de plantation. De ole devil; I gets mad ever’ time I think about it. Den dey took de man to war. De baby died, den I had to let dat ol’ devil’s baby suck dese same tiddies hanging right here. She was allus knockin’ me around. I worked in the house nursin’. 

“We allus had plenty of vegetables, salt meat, corn bread, hominy grits. Us didn’ know whut biscuit was. All de slaves on de plantation got vegetables from de Bosse’s garden. We never went to church, or no place – didn’ know it was such a thing. You know none of the white folks didn’t want the niggers to get out, they was afraid they would learn somethin’. They made my Ma have babies all de time; she was sellin’ the boys and keepin’ the gals.

“Her old brother was a doctor. He would give us pills when we got sick. I remember one day one of the mens had lockjaw. That ol’ woman made a fly blister, and put on dat poor nigger and let it stay until it blistered. Then took a stiff brush and roughed over dat sore place an’ when she did dat nigger hallowed and his jaws come unlocked. 

“After I was free I picked shrimp, worked in the Dago gardens, washed an’ ironed for de white folk. Ise too ol’ to do anything now – been lookin’ for the governor to give me some money, but he ain’t yet.”