Joel Buchanan Archive of African American History: http://ufdc.ufl.edu/ohfb
Samuel Proctor Oral History Program
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Program Director: Dr. Paul Ortiz 241 Pugh Hall PO Box 115215 Gainesville, FL 32611 (352) 392-7168 https://oral.history.ufl.edu
URR 006 William Warrior Underground Railroad Collection (URR) Interviewed by Paul Ortiz on June 21, 2012 1 hour | 28 pages
For information on terms of use of this interview, please see the SPOHP Creative Commons license at http://ufdc.ufl.edu/AfricanAmericanOralHistory.
URR 006 Interviewee: William Warrior Interviewer: Paul Ortiz Date: June 21, 2012
O: If we could start, if you wouldn’t mind, giving me your full name and telling me
where you’re from
W: Okay.
O: Okay, go ahead.
W: I’m William Dub Warrior. I’m from Brackettville, Texas, where I was born and
raised until I got married and went into the service. And I now live in Del Rio for
the last fifty-five years, I believe. And I came up to participate in this conference
and I’m glad to be interviewed by Paul.
O: Thank you, Sir. Mr. Warrior, can you tell me-when you were growing up, how
much of the histories of your family’s ancestry did you learn growing up and who
taught it to you or how did you learn it?
W: Well my grandmother raised me and I went to live with my grandmother when I
was four, I think. So she raised me and my older brother and sister. And I was
the one she kept around all the time. When she would go visit the old folks, which
there wasn’t no cars you know, and I’m talking about in [19]34, [19]35. So, the
way the old people did they had the same ways that they left from here, they
were still practicing ‘em. They would cook a little something and make sure that
the neighbor or one of their cousins or somebody had some too. They would take
little dishes, hey I fixed this. I think like they was having a contest in cooking
cuisine and see who cooked the best. That’s what I’m thinking now since I’ve
gotten older, because it wasn’t enough of the family but it was a taste. And this is
what people need to get back now because there’s so many people that are URR 006; Warrior; Page 2
wanting a house or too old people and I think they need to do that more but
people don’t have time to visit or nothing. I know I have children and
grandchildren, and their mother and their sisters live in the same area or in the
same town but they like—Fort Worth is a big town, it’s a city. They go for weeks
and don’t even call each other on the phone. I don’t understand that. It’s just, I
got my job, I got my life to live, whenever I get time I’ll call you or something. But,
I have friends that I see almost every day. If I don’t see them, they call. It doesn’t
take—and they on the phone, that’s what I tell my daughters. Say, you should
call us every day. I say, you on the phone. She said, well-she works at a
university-and she says I talk to people so much. I say, well just call and say, hey
how are you guys, I’m all right. That’s it. I said, we don’t need a conversation, we
just need that contact to know, well I heard from her today. And we do have
some people in our group that do call every day.
O: Mr. Warrior was that the way things were in your community when you were
growing up? People had more contact with each other?
W: Oh, yes. Yes, if they didn’t, they’d send the kids over. Go over and see how Aunt
Marley is doing, see if you can do anything for her. And see if she’s sick and
when they was sick they’d send the kids back and forth for things. And my Aunt
Marley Perman she—I used to when I was a kid get upset because she would
leave her house and walk over to my grandmother’s