Burton, Annie L.

African-American who wrote Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days. Born on a plantation near Clayton, Alabama; birth and death date unknown; one of four children of a slave woman and a white plantation owner from Liverpool, England; married Samuel L. Burton, 1888.

The available details of Annie L. Burton's life come from her 1909 autobiographical work Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days. Her narrative provides a glimpse into the world of the slave woman, while also relating the transition from slavery to freedom.

Raised in Alabama during the period of the Civil War, Annie Burton was the daughter of a slave woman and an English plantation owner whom Annie saw only a few times and from a distance. Her mother fled the plantation for a three-year period following a beating but returned at the end of the war to collect her children. Burton spent her early days of freedom eking out a living while residing with her mother, sister, and brother, as well as several other children her mother had brought along, in a small one-room log cabin. She then found work with a wealthy family who saw to it that she learned to read and write. Among the earliest black emigrants to the North during the postwar era, Burton arrived in Boston in 1879. She supported herself and her sister by working as a domestic and took over raising her nephew upon her sister's death. Burton moved to Georgia and eventually became a restaurateur in Jacksonville, Florida, and later in Boston, doing well enough financially to send her nephew through Hampton Institute. She married in 1888 and opened a rooming house with her husband. It was through an evening course at the Franklin School in Boston that Burton was encouraged to write her life story.

suggested reading:

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ed. Six Women's Slave Narratives. NY: Oxford University Press, 1988 (a collection of works of 19th-century black women by Annie L. Burton, "Old Elizabeth," Mattie J. Jackson, Lucy A. Delaney , and Kate Drumgoold ).