Submitted by Salmama Yusuf and Sharilyn Rider
He was sold at one month old.
Other children tried to drown him for being fast.
At 85, he made sure we would never forget.
In 1935, inside a small home in Tyler, Texas, an 85-year-old Black man sat down and began to speak. He knew time was running out — not just for him, but for every survivor like him.
His name was Preely Coleman, born into slavery in 1852 — thirteen years before freedom, thirteen years before the world would legally recognize him as human.
He was one of thousands interviewed by the Works Progress Administration, desperate to record the memories of formerly enslaved people before those memories vanished forever. It was Juneteenth — the holiday that once brought freedom to Texas — but Preely didn’t go out to celebrate.
He had something more important to give.
“I’m Preely Coleman, and I never gits tired of talking.”
His story came out in pieces — trauma softened only by age and the passing of decades.
Sold Before He Could Even Stand
Preely was born near Newberry, South Carolina. His mother was enslaved. His father? A Souba family son — a white man who raped her, as so many enslavers did.
When Preely was one month old, the Souba family decided his mother was too much trouble. So they sold her.
“They pays $1,500 for my mammy…
And I was throwed in.”
Thrown in. Like a bonus.
A one-month-old baby sold as an accessory.
His mother carried him the whole way from South Carolina to Texas — over a thousand miles on foot. A journey of exhaustion and agony for a woman who had given birth four weeks earlier.
But she did not put him down.
The Cost of Being Fast
On the plantation in Texas, Confederate soldiers would pass by on their way to war. They’d gather the enslaved children for entertainment — racing them to the mulberry tree.
There was a reward: a quarter.
Preely was fast — always fast.
“I nearly allus gits there first.”
But success breeds resentment — especially when enslaved children learned early that survival was competition.
One day, the children decided to stop him from winning.
They threw a rope around his neck and dragged him downhill — toward deep water.
He was seven or eight years old.
“I was nigh ’bout choked to death.”
Only one boy — Billy — tried to help him. The rest kept dragging.
They were going to drown him over a coin.
A white man, Captain Berryman, happened to ride past. He slashed the rope, pulled Preely’s limp body from the water, and dunked him repeatedly until he breathed again.
“They never tries to kill me any more.”
Said as if it were normal.
Because under slavery — it was.
A Boy Worked Like a Man
He grew up on the Selman plantation after being sold yet again. Days began at first light, ended in darkness.
“From can see to can’t see.”
They ate bread in pot liquor. Milk on rare days. Honey only sometimes.
He remembers the shoes — oh, the shoes.
Stiff red leather that tore skin until blood soaked in.
“I’ll never forgit ’em.”
Memories lodged where bone meets soul.
Freedom — Five Words in a Field
He was thirteen when his enslaver came into the field and said:
“You all is free as I is.”
No ceremony.
No apology.
Just five words.
“There was shoutin’ and singin’.
’Fore night us was all ’way to freedom.”
Freedom meant hunger, uncertainty, danger — but it meant life.
It meant future.
It meant he would never be bought again.
A Memory That Refused to Die
Preely lived seventy more years as a free man.
He survived Reconstruction.
He endured Jim Crow.
He watched America pretend it had already overcome its sins.
But in 1935, on a Juneteenth afternoon, he left us his testimony — raw, honest, unfiltered — so we could not pretend.
“I never gits tired of talking.”
He knew one truth:
If the people who lived through slavery did not speak, slavery would be rewritten by those who caused it.
And so he told us:
about the rope that nearly ended his childhood
about his mother walking a thousand miles with him in her arms
about being sold like a spare part
about a freedom that arrived too late for so many
We Remember Because He Spoke
Preely Coleman is gone.
But his voice remains.
A single voice among millions —
reminding us that slavery was not numbers in a textbook,
but babies sold,
children drowning,
families ripped apart,
survival earned breath by breath.
His memories pierce the silence of history and refuse to soften its edges.
We honor him by listening.
We honor him by remembering.