Wilson’s emergence as a leading tobacco market town drew hundreds of African-American migrants in the decades after the 1890s. Many left family behind in their home counties, perhaps never to be seen again. Others maintained ties the best way they could.
Sarah Henderson Jacobs Silver and her husband Jesse A. Jacobs Jr. left Dudley, in southern Wayne County, North Carolina, around 1905. They came to Wilson presumably for better opportunities off the farm. Each remained firmly linked, however, to parents and children and siblings back in Wayne County as well as those who had joined the Great Migration north. This post is the ninth in a series of excerpts and adaptations of interviews with my grandmother Hattie Henderson Ricks (1910-2001), Jesse and Sarah’s adoptive daughter (and Sarah’s great-niece), revealing the ways her Wilson family stayed connected to their far-flung kin. (Or didn’t.)
——
Jesse Jacobs Jr.’s first wife, Sallie Bridgers, died in 1895, shortly after the birth of their youngest child, Annie Bell. A year later, he married Sarah Daisy Henderson, who reared Sallie’s children alongside her own daughter, Hattie Mae Jacobs, and her sister’s two children, Bessie Henderson and Jesse Henderson. Jesse’s sons, James Daniel Jacobs (1881-1952), Dock Davis Jacobs (circa 1888-1944), and Reddick Jacobs (1889-1921), were grown by time my grandmother came to live with Jesse and Sarah. They were not her blood kin, but were family nonetheless. Each lived in Wilson for short stretches, with the younger two moving back and forth between North Carolina and New York City.
This is what my grandmother told me about Reddick Jacobs:
The other brother, the younger one. Reddick. He was one that got shot in the café. He was getting ready to leave, and say him and another fellow got to arguing, and the man shot him. Well, they brought him home. Papa was living then. They brought him home, and they had to bring the body up to the house. And me and [her sister] Mamie had to go examine it, you know. But I didn’t put my hands on him. I went in there and looked at him, and I said, “Well, where did he get shot?” After he was all dressed up, laying out there in the casket. And so Mamie said, she said, “Girl, don’t you see? They shot him right in his face. Right there.” And I said, “I don’t see nothing.” And then she had to put her finger right in his eye. And it was in his left eye. It went right in through there and come out the back of his head. He was sitting at the restaurant, and a fellow shot him.
Reddick Jacobs was buried in the Congregational Church cemetery in Dudley. His patched-up headstone stands near his father’s and records his death date as 28 November 1921, but I have not yet located his death certificate.
Last night, I happened upon this brief report of a police shooting in Wilson. The victim, Howard Jacobs, died 27 November 1922.
The Johnson City Staff (Johnson City, Tenn.), 28 November 1922.
Wait. Was this the report of Reddick Jacobs’ killing? Had the reporter misheard his first name — as so often happened? Had whoever bought his headstone misremembered his death date — also common?
Coincidences notwithstanding — no. Though Reddick Jacobs’ death certificate seems to have gone unfiled, Howard Jacobs’ was recorded, and he was not the same man as Reddick.
Howard Jacob died 27 November 1922 in Wilson. Per his death certificate, he was born in December 1904 in Clinton, N.C., to Theophus Jacob [Theophilus Jacobs] and Mary I. Hobbs; was single; lived on Viola Street; and worked in farming for John Wells. His cause of death was “homicide — shot by policeman.” Jacobs was buried in Moltonville, North Carolina.
Unsurprisingly, at inquest, the policeman was cleared of any wrongdoing. I can find nothing further about Howard Jacobs’ short time in Wilson. Though he was not a son of Jesse A. Jacobs Jr., both were likely members of the same large extended Jacobs family, free people of color now closely (but not exclusively) associated with Lumbee and Coharie Indians.