I have not written much at all about Mattie Roper,which I don't know why as she was such a strong and powerful figure. She and Morgan Goodson stand head to head within the Goodson family. Alas, last summer, when I was again in Prattville, I went to the courthouse and found a document where she made him pay her--in money and in goods, for money that she had loaned to him before their marriage. She was quite a character. My great-great grandmother was a strong, beautiful spirit who drove hard to do for her children and to make sure that, as the mother from the Women of Brewster Place said, "her children would never have to apologize to anyone for who they were or what they were, whatever they looked like." Morgan Goodson was fierce, but he was a bit of a lazy man--intelligent, but when his children got old enough, he let them work his land and he sat down.
He was also strong willed and as I said, mean. When he would get in his moods, when his children were younger, he would take his seat in his chair on their porch and wouldn't move for days on end and would leave her to get food and work the fields for their children. Mattie was a strong woman. She was also reportedly the best shot in Autauga County. She knew herbs and medicine, and in her later years went around from house to house visiting all of her children and their families, giving them medicines so that they wouldn't get sick during the year.

Mattie was fourteen when she had her first child. She was born in 1857; Morgan was born in 1854. Her mother was a white woman named Caroline Roper, the daughter of a methodist minister and her father was a stud on the plantation(owned by someone else, I don't know whom), named Greenberry Smith. A stud is a breeder, which means that Greenberry's job on the plantation was to have children. He had 49 of them that we know of. Greenberry's was an odd case, as he was a mulatto and they rarely bred mulattoes as their children could run away. However, mulattoes were bred because a light-skinned mulatto slave, especially a girl, brought a higher price on the market than the average slave. Mattie Roper was a very, very light skinned woman. I may post her picture sometime if I figure out how to do that. Anyway, she was all but a white woman. They said you couldn't tell she was a woman of color until her children were surrounding her. Morgan, on the other hand was dark, a very dark brown with red eyes. His father, Philip Goodson, is said to have been a mulatto as well and his mother was a full-blooded Cherokee by the name of Pee Y( I do not know how to spell this).

They say Mattie could rarely be caught wearing a dress and could work a plow better than any man. Indeed she represents a kind of strength that I hear a lot equated with women of color, especially slave women, of that time. I have heard that some slave women, when they were pregnant, would be in the field when it was their time to deliver and would simply stop their in the middle of the field and have that child and then get right back up and go to work. Incredible. It is said that she told, when she was a girl, on the plantation(I should find out who's plantation, although it is said she was owned by her Grandfather--so perhaps), that it was her job to fetch water for the white men when ever there was company. She said that she would take her bucket and get the water and then dip her hair in it and take it to them to drink. Her hair was so fine( I don't know what that means) that they wouldn't know it was wet and would go right on drinking that water. This is one of the first acts of resistance that I had ever heard of and I thought it was fucking fantastic!

Mattie Roper died in the 1920's and the story goes that once Morgan Goodson was fussing loudly at her and she told him, " Morgan, if you don't stop fussing at me you're going to make my heart overflow." Well, he kept on and so she killed over. Both Morgan and Mattie are buried in our family cemetary. I will definitely try to get her picture online( I highly doubt I will be successful).