Wilson, Mary Jane

One of the rooms in the Old Folks Home for Colored in Portsmouth, Virginia is occupied by an ex-slave -- one of the first Negro teachers of Portsmouth.

On meeting Miss Mary Jane Wilson, very little questioning was needed to get her to tell of her life. Drawing her chair near a small stove, she said, "my Mother and Father was slaves, and when I was born, that made me a slave. I was the only child. My Mother was owned by one family, and my Father was owned by another family. My mother and father was allowed to live together. One day my father's mastah took my father to Norfolk and put him in a jail to stay until he could sell him. My missus bought my father so he could be with us."

"During this time I was small, and I didn't have so much work to do. I jus helped around the house.
I was in the yard one day, and I saw so many men come marching down the street, I ran and told my mother what I'd seen. She tried to tell me what it was all about, but I couldn't understand her. Not long after that we was free."

Taking a long breath, the old woman said, "My father went to work in the Norfolk Navy Yard as a teamster. He began right away buying us a home. We was one of the first Negro-land owners in Portsmouth after emancipation. My father builed his own house. It's only two blocks from here, and it still stands with few improvements."

With a broad smile Miss Wilson added, "I didn't get any teachings when I was a slave. When I was free, I went to school. The first school I went to was held in a church. Soon they builded a school building that was called, 'Chestnut Street Academy, and I went there. After finishing Chestnut Street Academy, I went to Hampton Institute. In 1874, six years after Hampton Institute was started, I graduated."

At this point Miss Wilson's pride was unconcealed. She continued her conversation, but her voice was much louder and her speech was much faster. She remarked, "My desire was to teach. I opened, a school in my home, and I had lots of students. After two years my class grew so fast and large that my father built a school for me in our back yard. I had as many as seventy-five pupils at one time. Many of them became teachers. I had my gradustice exercises in the Eranuel A. M. E. Church. Those were my happiest days."

From W.P.A. Papers Washington State Historical Society Tacoma, Washington
THE NEGRO IN THE STATE OF WASHINGTON: SLAVE ORIGINS by Marvin F. Gaston Seattle, Washington

Although the State of Washington is far removed from the original home of slavery, the south, it is not too far to have claimed some of the survivors of this now obsolete institution. Many industrious slave families accepted the opportunity to come west, feeling that Horace Greely would not miss the mark of his injunction, even though it was to young men. Ostracism, which was prevalent despite the proclamation declaring the Negro free, also led to the northern and western trek. As early as 1888 slave families were found in the state. Today those few who remain have an interesting story to tell. Having been mere youth during slavery, they recall many rambling incidents, which when woven together gives one an unusual view of those times. On the other hand, their recollections are as if they had lived two lives since they experienced the early growth of the western empire as well. This essay will picture for you the lives of some of these people who not only had sought freedom of bondage and gained it, but sought a wider freedom---the west---and gained that.

Sarah Walker has been a resident of Seattle for thirty years, having come at the invitation of her son after the death of her second husband. She recalled quite vividly some of the incidents of slavery and had others enhanced by the constant repetition of them by her parents.

She was born Sarah Fisher, the latter name being that of her "master", Saline county, Missouri about five or six years before emancipation. a family of six girls and five boys she was next to the eldest. It is quite unusual that the entire family including a maternal grandmother, were all owned by Jade Fisher, and fortunate too. She remembers how her father's family had been broken up among various plantations and on the death of one of his sisters it was found that she had lived within a mile of him for years. Sias, Mrs. Walker's father, was a farm hand, while Winnie her mother was a personal maid.

One outstanding impression remembered was the brutality of "Master her". "Oh but that man was mean", she said as she related his frequent beating of her mother for minor mistakes. Once her uncle was tied a post and beat unmercifully and afterward the almost nude body was sprinkled with salt. It was those hectic days, she said which made her think of them as only a bad dream.
During the thick of the war, a regiment of soldiers passed directly through their settlement and her father, not knowing which troops they were, carefully concealed his family beneath a large plum tree which was covered with long rambling vines. Later this same day some scouts approached their cabin inquiring if any troops had passed earlier during the day. Not until Sias was sure they were Union scouts did he disclose the direction in which the soldiers had gone.

Throughout it all the slaves still trusted in the supreme master, and yet their worship had to be concealed. At night when they should have retired forty or fifty would be assembled in a cabin singing and praying with a large kettle turned face downward in the center of the floor to withhold the sound.

At one time Abraham Lincoln visited her home county and while investigating conditions of the slaves stopped at her family cabin. His height and dignity frightened the children and they fled in hiding. It was not until her father assured them that "Massa Lincoln" wouldn't harm them that they left their places of refuge.

After emancipation Sias Fisher and his family were concealed on a boat and carried to Far City, Missouri. Here they started life anew. He got work on a farm and provided admirably for his family. He ahared the crops with his employer who furnished the working implements. Not long after, however, "lung trouble" caused his death and the mother moved with the children from place to place wherever she could secure employment. The older children made rag rugs to sell, while the youngsters attended school, such as it was.

While in Council Bluff, Kansas, Sarah married a railroad man and born to them were two sons. Mr. Payne died, and Mrs. Walker married again. When Mr. Walker died, the boys who were residents of Seattle, sent for her. Mrs. Walker says, "I am proud to call Seattle my home".

Sarah Laws, now a resident of Spokane, had somewhat similar recollections of slavery. About seven years after freedom she married John Hill and migrated to Kansas where he died. John had been a slave on a cotton plantation. He had been in the Civil War, assisting the doctors as they aided the wounded and amputated legs. Mrs. Laws' daughter brought her to Spokane to live with her.

Born during the days of slavery, Sarah Laws was the youngest of a family of seven girls and four boys, who with their mother, Haggar, and their father Manual, were owned by Master Green, a good kind master. Due to financial difficulties Master Green was forced, when Sarah was four years old, to sell the family to Master Baltimore. Baltimore was a kind and generous old man, but he employed a foreman who was a hard man to work, for, and drove the slaves to desperation with his repeated goading and "slave driving" tactics.

Sarah was not very old, when Mr. Baltimore died and all his property, including slaves, passed to his four daughters and their husbands. The Laws family was given to the sister who had married Master Rollander; he did not condone the practice of slavery, but his wife had no compulsions and the slaves were forced to work for her. The main crops were corn and alfalfa. Sarah recalls vividly how hard she was forced to work and how little she was fed, the main 'vittles' she ate was cornbread three times a day, salt pork about once a month and eggs once a week. Neither she nor her family received any money and were constantly reminded by their mistress that they owed her money for their keep.

The little girl wished to go to school to learn to read and write, which privilege was of course forbidden, and once when the mistress found her reading a book she was given a sound thrashing and a drastic scolding for wasting her time and not tending to her allotted work. Shortly after this last sale of the family, to quote Sarah Laws Hill, "Mr. Laws was a good slave, and wanted to earn some good money, and Master Rollander said If he gave him $500 he would let him go, so he did this and went to Callfornia." Where Manuel Laws got the $500 Sarah is unable to say. Manuel went to California, mined his little claim and was soon able to buy from the Master his wife and the four children he was able to locate, he never found the other seven. He then bought a little farm in Missouri and farmed it all through the Civil War.

Sarah Laws has vivid recollections of the war and its results. She heard the cannons, helped and fed many of the soldiers of both the Union and the Confederate armies. She knew the building in Kansas where John Brown kept the slaves he had smuggled out of Missouri. She saw and talked to John Brown, and describes him as a great man. With the war came the "Carpet Baggers", those unscrupulous Northerners who would promise the slaves money and freedom if they went with them, the men who would then take the slaves farther south and sell them for whatever they could get as they knew the Emancipation Proclamation was imminent. When Lincoln declared all the slaves free most of them went North with the Union soldiers, but many, because they had no money, were forced to stay on the plantation. After the proclamation, "the masters gave the slaves just barely enough for them to keep body and soul together, very little food and no clothing, this of course was done to keep them from running away". But some of them "ran away on their nerve."
According to Mrs. Ellen Miller, Master Long was a kind old gentleman too who treated his slaves as any member of his family. He played with the slave children and frequently visited the family cabins. Mrs. Miller was born Ellen Long, in Albany, Kentucky in 1848, the eldest of two girls. Her father tilled the soil and her mother was the cook on the plantation. Mrs. Miller smiled when she said, "and she sure was some cook".

Despite her seventeen years of age at the time of emancipation she does not recall many of the actual happenings of the time. She recalls, however, hearing her mother and father talk of the gross injustices that other masters were administering to their slaves. When the Civil War started Master Long realized that at last a blow had been struck at the evil system he had despised, but had been a part of it only because it was necessary for his livelihood. His slaves were such only in name. He promised them that they would have a decent start when they were officially free. This he really did.

Mrs. Miller saw the immortal Lincoln, standing as she said, "in all dignity and charm, and yet you had the feeling he was saying all the time, I am no better than you are". She remembered when the news was spread of his death, how her parents were grief stricken. The Negroes bent in reverent prayer, thanking God for having given them such a noble character, and they asked that he might dwell with the spirits forever.

In 1871 the family with fourteen other Negroes migrated in a covered wagon to Lebanon, Missouri where they got employment on a farm. It was at Eldridge, Missouri that Ellen met and married Clarence Miller in 1882. It was here that their two sons were born. Both boys grew to manhood here and moved away. Clarence Jr. became a mail-carrier in Seattle and today is a respected citizen in the Negro community. Upon the death of his father he sent his wife to bring his mother to the coast. Today, despite her advanced age, Mrs. Miller is extremely active---especially in church circles where she is known as "Mother Miller" to old and young folk alike.

Mrs. Alice Freeman, who has been a resident of Spokane for thirty years recalls many experiences as the daughter of a slave parent. Her story presents a different side of the slave question and gives actual conditions of children of some mixed parent associations during this era. It has been said by many historians that after the emancipation thousands of "mulatto" Negroes, offsprings of Negro women, and their white masters went into the ranks of the whites unnoticed.

To the average Negro, slavery was the greatest single factor in American Negro history. Mrs. Freeman's mother was a Negro, claimed to be one of the most striking and stunning black women she has ever seen. Her father was a white planter who owned a large and exceedingly fertile acreage in Missouri. To this union five children were born, three girls and two boys. The children lived the normal life of today, and were clothed as was proper and fitting a child of that time. Mr. Freeman was a man of considerable wealth, because aside from having his large acreage---the main crops being grains, corn and vegetables---was the supervisor of a large Federal distillery on his land. As each of the five children reached an age when their father considered them competent to handle their own affairs, they were deeded (with a clear title that could not be contested regardless of the fact that in their case they were not supposed to own land) a tract of land.

About the time Mrs. Freeman was given her land the "Carpet Baggers" came to the south and told the free Negroes to come north with them. They promised good jobs, easy money and equality with the whites. With this glowing recommendation many of the ignorant and illiterate Negroes went north with them where they were forced to work for little or no money. The result was many of them resorted to crime and those who did not either returned to the south or stayed in the north where many of them died of pneumonia and tuberculosis.

It was the fabulous tales of these men that caused Mrs. Freeman and her two sisters to sell their land and come West, where she met and married Mr. Freeman.
Particular interest is gleaned from the story told by Mrs. Cornelia J. Flowers also an inhabitant of the capital city of the Inland Empire, Spokane. Besides having a very clear recollection of the days of slavery, she gives her impressions of the west in pioneer days, especially of Spokane and the surrounding area.

She was born in 1866 of slave parents, one of five children, and raised at Vicksburg, Mississippi, at the scene of the Civil War's most hard-fought battle. Her mother, whose maiden name was McCalpin, seldom spoke of the slave days because of her bitterness towards it, but her father, John R. Holmes, spoke of it, as he wanted his children to thoroughly understand their background.

John Holmes father was a Spanish sea captain, who sailed the Seven Seas in a four-mast schooner. On one of his trips to America he brough his young wife to Savannah, Georgia, and later, left her in the care of a Mr. Ball, a tavern keeper, while making an outgoing trip across the ocean. He never returned as he was killed at sea and buried there. Six months later Mrs. Flower's father was born, and two months later, Mr. Ball sold her grandmother and father into slavery, despite the fact that they were not Negroes but Spaniards. Their skin was dark, and being that color, Mr. Ball took advantage of their helplessness and sold them as mulattos to a Mr. Elgin Wells, a plantation owner and slave master. When her father was old enough to understand, his mother told him of the injustices which had been administered to them and that they might be even separated. It was not long before her premonition came to pass, and Mr. Holmes never saw his mother again.

Mr. Holmes was then taken from Savannah, Georgia to Vicksburg, Mississippi by his master and it was there he met and married Mrs. Flower's mother. When they were both freed, Mr. Holmes went to work for the Vicksburg and Meridian Railroad, and from his wages bought land and a home from the V & M Railroad Co, at Vicksburg.

Her father told her of frequent whippings received from the slave master whose cruelty exceeded that of a mad brute, and who often broke a young mother's heart by selling her away from her children. Very frequently this master bought slaves at such a young age they would never know the name of their parents, so they would adopt the name of their present master.

Despite educational ostracism, Mrs. Flowers attended school in Mississippi and completed the sixth grade, equivalent to about the fourth grade in schools in the west. Her education from then on was received through consistent reading and private study and through contact with other people.

In 1887 she migrated west and while enroute met Jerry Flowers whom she married in the same year, at Murry, Idaho. For many years Mr. Flowers worked as a cook on the river boats of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers to Fort Benton, Montana Territory, at the headwaters of the Missouri. For a considerable period of time, before the railroads were completed across the continent, travelers to the west chose this method of travel, leaving Fort Benton and traveling overland to the west coast. It was in this manner that Mr. Flowers came to Helena, Montana in 1885, where he was employed as chef at the famous Montana Club of Helena. In 1888 he followed a rush of miners to the gold fields in the Coeur d'Alenes of Idaho Territory, locating at Wallace. Later the same year the couple moved to Spokane where Mr. Flowers opened the Pacific Hotel. Here he acquired fame as the "best meat cook in the Northwest". For a number of years he cooked at the Big 7 Restaurant at S. 12 Lincoln Street which still stands today. At one time in 1890 a whole trainload of Idaho miners came to the restaurant to have turtle soup, made from a huge turtle caught in the Snake River, near Lewistown, Idaho. Its shell measured two feet across and two and one-half feet long; its meat made enough soup to fill a hogshead, (140 gallons). This was the largest turtle ever known to be caught in the west. Mrs. Flowers now has at her home this turtle's shell as proof of its size.

The couple saw the great Spokane fire of 1889 but were fortunate to live in a section of town that didn't burn. Spokane Falls, at the time of their arrival, was quite impressive in contrast to the environment of the south. Horse cars were used for transportation. Mrs. Flowers remembers seeing the first automobile in Spokane, a small coupe run from an electric battery. It was owned by Dr. E. D. Olmstead, later mayor of Spokane.

Thousands of Indians, the Spokanes, and the Nez Perce, roamed the streets. Indian women carried their babies on their backs and dragged strange sled-like conveyances behind their ponies. Among the famous people Mr. and Mrs. Flowers knew were 'Deat-on-the-Trail', Spokane scout for many years, and Bill Cody, the Buffalo Bill of pioneer western history.

In concluding Mrs. Flowers said that the far west has proved a better place for living as racial discrimination is not as prevalent as in the south. Mr. Flowers also had shared in this opinion. He passed in April 1911 from an attack of pneumonia. He left in his wife's possession many old pictures of Indian chiefs and villages given him as presents from the Indians. One of her prize possessions is a genuine Indian War club used by a Nez Perce chief in battles, which Mr. Flowers received in appreciation of the "skookum food" he had cooked for the Indians.

No account of the many revelations these grand old people can make, would be complete without the story of Seattle's model Negro citizens, George and Carrie Selby.

Mrs. Selby, despite her lack of educational training, attracts one as being a thoroughly educated woman. And indeed she is with the richness of her experiences--a truly self trained woman whose keen mind, wise judgment, and remarkable memory, are the envy of all those who know her. Mr. Selby was likewise denied the opportunity for an education but has relied on the guidance of his wife to assist him in solving the many problems he has confronted.

Carrie Selby was born in Mobile, Alabama on October 9, 1855, which made her ten years of age at the time of emancipation. She knew none of the hardships described by many slaves, because Master Thompson was a model man. She feels today that many of the stories told of the brutality of Masters, are really stories of the injustices metered out by the paid overseers of the plantations. Although the masters were responsible many of the slaves did not report mistreatment for fear of further punishment from these overseers. "I am proud of my slave background", she said with all the force of an orator, "because I have that "get up" of a slave and know the "value of a dollar". She criticized the younger generation who lacks initiative and wise judgment in the expenditure of money. The couple is very proud that now (1936) they are financially independent, enjoying all of the modern comforts of their modest home which has been theirs for the thirty-six years they have been residents of Seattle.

Carrie remembered the famous battle of Mobile Bay---how her family with others trembled at the roar of cannons. She nursed the Union soldiers and often found herself hiding food for them. She had the misfortune of not having the protection of her parents during this period since both through the kindness of Master Thompson had bought their freedom. Her father became a freedman minister, and resided in Cleveland, Alabama. The parents, however, kept in constant touch with their children. It was through the careful guidance that Mr. Thompson gave his young daughter that she became the ideal christian she is today, for she is one of the most respected members of the Negro Methodist Church. One can see her each Sunday as she alights from her taxi, going to and from Church, as her condition is such that she cannot walk to the carline.

Soon after emancipation Carrie began "roaming" as she called it, and today finds that she has been in every principle city in the United States. It has been this travel, with the constant contact with people of all walks of life which has given her the practical education she possesses. During her travels she resided in Minneapolis for some time and it was here that she met George. He was a bashful young man who attracted her with his nice soldiers uniform, and it was not long before this acquaintance blossomed into marriage on January 8, 1884. George had likewise been a slave and had taken to travel after emancipation.

Together this couple has lived fifty-two years in an almost perfect association.

Shortly after their marriage the couple moved to North Dakota, but the weather was such that for George's sake they moved to Seattle in 1900. Mr. Selby immediately found employment as a bonded nightwatchman for McDougall Southwick Department store at Second Avenue and Pike Street. He has worked for them ever since, and today although he is no required to work since he enjoys a pension, he continues to go and carr out his duties as best he can. In relating some of their early experiences in Seattle about the store they referred to it as "our store As if a page from a story book was being read, so Mrs. Selby described in true picturesque style the night the news was spread of Abraham Lincoln's death. "George what was you doing the night President Lincoln was shot". "Carrie I will never forget, I was sitting on the backyard fence whittling a stick with my prize knife, and beside me was old John Dickson, the neighborhood scamp. Suddenly we heard my father come from the town center screaming the news about Lincoln. I shall never forget it was such a nice night, the moon was shining bright." "So it was, just as clear as it could be," she added. "I can remember just as if it was yesterday, when the man on a horse came galloping through the street. His horse was travelling so fast until his hoofs were bearly touching the ground."
It was somewhat in the same manner that the Selby's described seeing Sitting Bull, and Custer during the Indian Wars in which Mr. Selby served. Today he enjoys also a pension for his services in these wars

Together with his pension from McDougall Southwick the family is independent and enjoy all the comfort their old age deserves.
Such has been the origins of ex-slaves in the State of Washington. Thus is the tapestry of their lives--those people who experienced an unforgettable period of American history, only to embark on a trek to the greater freedom offered by the west. Here their lives have grasped the threads of western life and have been woven into another period of history. The loom is not idle for through their children and grandchildren they are weaving the strong threads of the richness of their experiences into a clearer pattern---more clear and freer from the imperfections of their own. In so much as those who follow them in the way they suggest just that much will they not have endured slavery in vain. Surely these people have learned to live by living just as one learns to weave by weaving.

(Interview of Miss Mary Jane Wilson, Fortsmouth, Virginia, By - Thelma Dunston, NEGRO PICNEER TEACHER OF PORTSMOUTH, VIRGINIA)