Freedom

Rules and regulations for patrollers.

Prior to Wilson County’s formation in 1855, much of its present-day territory lay in Edgecombe, including everything east of a line running a couple of miles inside present-day Interstate 95 and north of Contentnea Creek. In 1844, the Tarboro’ Press published “Rules and Regulations to be Observed by the Patrollers of the several Districts in the County of Edgecombe.” Slave patrols, known as patrollers or patty rollers, were government-sanctioned groups of armed men charged with monitoring and enforcing discipline upon enslaved people.

Edgecombe County patrollers operated under a set of comprehensive and precise rules. Tasked with visiting ever house inhabited by enslaved people at least once a month, they rode at night. They searched for firearms and “seditious publications” and kept a sharp lookout for any enslaved person out and about more than a mile from home. They could beat people — up to 15 lashes — for having too much fun. On Sundays, their job was to make sure enslaved people were not “strolling about” enjoying their one day off or selling trinkets for pocket change. Patrollers ran down runaways and, if met with “insolence,” could drop a whip 39 times across a black back. They were compensated for their services.

Tarboro’ Press, 9 March 1844.

Lane Street Project: Juneteenth thank yous!

And it’s a wrap! Juneteenth weekend was extra-special for Lane Street Project. For the first time, we had a booth at Wilson’s Juneteenth Festival, and our first summertime clean-up, co-sponsored by Scarborough House Resort, was a resounding success!

Special thanks to David Speight of Mount Hebron Lodge #42; festival vendor chairperson Sheryletta Lacewell; Lane Street Project volunteers Castonoble Hooks, Briggs Sherwood, Billy and Christina Foster, Brittany Hamm, and Lisa Benoy Gamble; and Jen Kehrer and the good folks of Scarborough House. Thanks also to everyone who stopped by our booth Saturday to learn more about our work at Odd Fellows and Vick Cemeteries and all who showed up in today’s steamy heat to take back a little bit of sacred ground.

Photos courtesy of Jen Kehrer and Derek Griffin.

Lane Street Project: help wanted!

Lane Street Project has an opportunity to set up a booth at Wilson Juneteenth Festival to raise awareness of our work and the cemeteries we serve. This is an excellent chance to connect with the community, especially families who might be descended from or related to people buried in Vick Cemetery.

We have less than three weeks to pull this together. The festival is June 17th and runs from 2:00 P.M.-9:00 P.M. We need more volunteers who will commit to manning our booth during the day. We’ll be handing out informational literature about the clean-ups at Odd Fellows and about the recent findings at Vick Cemetery. If you’ve been wanting to help Lane Street Project, but dragging vines out of the woods isn’t your thing, please consider volunteering for an hour or two.

If interested, please contact me as soon as possible at blackwideawake@gmail.com or via the Lane Street Project Facebook page. Thank you!

Recommended reading, no. 13: the long emancipation.

Priscilla Joyner was born in Nash County, not Wilson, but close enough for her life story — and the context in which it unfolded — to be of particular interest to Black Wide-Awake readers.

“Priscilla Joyner was born into the world of slavery in 1858 North Carolina and came of age at the dawn of emancipation. Raised by a white slaveholding woman, Joyner never knew the truth about her parentage. She grew up isolated and unsure of who she was and where she belonged—feelings that no emancipation proclamation could assuage.

“Her life story—candidly recounted in an oral history for the Federal Writers’ Project—captures the intimate nature of freedom. Using Joyner’s interview and the interviews of other formerly enslaved people, historian Carole Emberton uncovers the deeply personal, emotional journeys of freedom’s charter generation—the people born into slavery who walked into a new world of freedom during the Civil War. From the seemingly mundane to the most vital, emancipation opened up a myriad of new possibilities ….

“… Uncertainty about her parentage haunted her life, and as Jim Crow took hold throughout the South, segregation, disfranchisement, and racial violence threatened the loving home she made for her family. But through it all, she found beauty in the world and added to it where she could.”

Priscilla Joyner’s family in the 1860 census of Dortches township, Nash County, N.C. She is believed to have been the daughter of Ann Liza Joyner and an unknown African-American man.

Review at www.wwnorton.com.

“I haven’t freed you yet.”

Hugh B. Johnston, writing as “An Old Reporter,” wrote dozens of genealogy columns for the Daily Times and Rocky Mount Telegram. His piece about Jesse Farmer relayed two anecdotes highlighting the violent treatment of enslaved people.

In the first, after naming the eight people Jesse and Mary Batts Farmer enslaved near present-day Elm City — Nellie, Clarkey, Ailsey, Dinah, Jim, Jerry, Hilliard, and Cindy — Johnston recounts Dinah’s reaction to Emancipation. “I understand that I’d been freed,” she told Jesse Farmer. “Well, I haven’t freed you yet,” he responded, and beat her.

The second incident occurred during the Civil War. A free woman of color named Clarkey had just died, and her body lay in a cabin at the edge of the yard. Jim O’Neal, overseer on a neighboring plantation, arrived with several people enslaved by Dr. George Sugg. O’Neal accused Jerry of having stolen one of his hogs with Bill, an enslaved man standing “nearly naked and bound with leather straps.” Mary Batts Farmer defended Jerry and declared he would not be beaten. When O’Neal threatened to do so anyway, Mary Farmer told Jerry to defend himself. He grabbed an ax and walked away, and despite orders, the enslaved men with O’Neal refused to follow. O’Neal then took Bill under the lean-to of Clarkey’s cabin and forced the others to beat him with switches “until he almost smoked.”

Rocky Mount Telegram, 14 March 1956.

  • Jerry Farmer

In 1866, Jerry Farmer and Kate Sugs registered their two-year cohabitation with a Wilson County justice of the peace.

In the 1870 census of Gardners township, Wilson County: Jerry Farmer, 26, and wife Kate, 26.

In the 1880 census of Gardners township, Wilson County: farm laborer Jerry Farmer, 37, widower.

On 10 January 1884, Jerry Farmer, 39, married Annice Pender, 23, at Abram Sharpe’s. Charles Barnes, Haywood Batts, and Haywood Pender were witnesses.

Daniel, freedom seeker.

Daniel, a tall, handsome, dark-skinned man, left William Barnes’ plantation near Oak Grove [Saratoga] on the night of 20 September 1834. Eleven months later, Barnes began running ads in the Tarboro Press, offering a $50 reward for Daniel’s capture. Despite specific details about Daniel’s physique, his mother and siblings (from whom he had been separated when sold by Asahel Farmer), and even his father (a blacksmith who worked nearly independently in Nash County), Daniel was still on the lam in May 1936 when this ad ran, and as late as April 1837, when the Press re-printed it.

Tarboro’ Press, 7 May 1836.

Four years later, Abner Tison, another Saratoga-area planter, offered a reward for a Daniel whose physical description closely matched the Daniel above. He’d been missing a year. Though the ages are off, this Daniel had some notable scars, and was said to have been raised in Pitt County, this is surely the same knock-kneed man, bound and determined to take his freedom.

Tarboro’ Press, 24 July 1841.

Save Your Spaces.

I’m honored to join these amazing women at Save Your Spaces Cultural Heritage and Historic Preservation Festival to talk about successes and challenges in the critical work of preserving African-American cemeteries.

If you’re intrigued by local history, have stories to tell or histories to preserve, are curious and want to learn more about cultural heritage and create ways to preserve it, please join us March 4 at Create ATL, 900 Murphy Avenue SW, Atlanta.

Irene Barron, Wilson’s Rosa Parks.

Wilson Daily Times, 3 July 1943.

Meet Irene Barron, American hero.

Twelve years before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a Montgomery, Alabama, bus, Irene Barron sat down in the white section of a Wilson bus and held her ground. Barron’s action followed James Parker‘s similar refusal by three months and suggests concerted action.

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Do you know of Irene Barron? I am seeking more information about this freedom fighter.

Thanks to J. Robert Boykin III for the clipping.