Fountain Hughes was a former slave born in 1848 in Charlottesville, VA. In 1949 he was interviewed by the Library of Congress as part of their Federal Writers Project that recorded former slaves stories and experiences.
In this brief video, we hear him talk about his life as a young man growing up on a plantation in the South. Hughes is noted as saying that he rather be dead than be a slave again.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=CGLqEJgzlKM