A Slave In The Family

[ThomWV]

I thought it might be valuable to someone to hear this story of a slave I knew when I was a child in South Carolina. The slave's name was Mary.

Mary was old, close to 80, when my sister and I were children in the early '50's. She 'worked' for our Aunt Ellen. Mary's parents had been owned by Ellen's grandparents. Mary was born in the same building she died in, a building not much more than a shed on the back of my Aunt's inherited property. The place had been given to her as her 'home' long before I was born. Ellen (widowed by WW-II) may have paid her some very small amount of money in the later years, or maybe she didn't - I don't know. As old as she was Mary still cooked and tended to the children. She was a terror.

On the day that she died Mary had never traveled over 10 miles from the place where she was born. When her young parents were freed during the Civil War they simply stayed where they were. They worked, they were housed, they were fed; an absurd thing to say when you realize they grew, raised, slaughtered, cleaned, gleaned, and cooked just about every scrap of food that came into that household. They had just one child, Mary. Mary came into Ellen's parent's house to work as a child and never left. She was illiterate, small, unmarried, and mean. She did not have a dollar on the day she died.

Of course she was not a slave and had never been a slave. Lincoln saw to that. But how can anyone say she was ever anything other than a slave?

[panader0]

1. Great story.

[FirstLight]

2. I have family back in Misissippi, and I remember visiting

an older woman named Cora...she was about 100 and lived in a shack on someone's back 40. She may no have been born a slave. But the society of the south was not that far off, even in the 1980's.

An interesting aside. I grew up in Oakland, and had been friends with a rainbow of children by the time I was 10. When we were in Vicksburg, my dad & I went for a walk, and got lost. we found ourselves in the "black" part of town...folks were out on their porches, drinking iced tea and visiting...and we stopped to ask for directions... They imediately said "you aint't from 'round here" because we were white, and not only in their neighborhood, but because we actually spoke with them as regular people! and they were just regular folks... very sweet and helpful. My aunt was horrified when we came back and told our story, like we'd been in a dangerous place...so blind by generations of predjudice.

Thanks for this story, thom...

[Terran]

3. Thanks for that

In my years at DU, I've seen a lot of people dismiss the influence of slavery as a factor in the lives of modern day African-Americans (especially in discussions about reparations). "Oh, it was so long ago." "No one living today was born a slave!" Well, your story just illustrates how close slavery still is to us. A lot of us were born in the 1960's or earlier, and one hundred years prior to our births is really not very long, *because* there are people still living whose grandparents were slaves. The generation whose own parents were slaves has only recently departed the scene, for the most part; recently enough so that a lot of us could have known them.

My partner's grandmother just died five years ago, and she would have been 100 this year; her father was a slave. She always said he never would talk about it to her or any of her sisters. But it was a presence in her life.

[ensho]

4. kick

nt