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Edited on Thu Apr-10-08 09:37 AM by 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?
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