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.)
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Here, we read my grandmother’s recounting of the escape from Wilson of her sister Mamie Henderson Holt to Greensboro, North Carolina, at the age of 15. Mamie’s first child, John Holt, was born 4 December 1923 — 100 years ago today! — and before long she brought her baby to Wilson, to 303 Elba Street, to meet his family. His 13 year-old aunt was overjoyed, but the difficult, distrustful relationship between Mamie and “Papa” Jesse Jacobs soon brought the visit to an abrupt end.
“Papa closed up the davenport on John. Just by it — he was grunting or groaning for breath or something. I went out to see what it was, coming from out of the kitchen and dining room where he was in that room across the hall on that open couch. That’s where Papa was looking his old shoes or something to put on, and he went there and turned up the end of that thing. If he had shut him up in there, it’d a killed him, but he just turned up the end of it. And he didn’t see his shoes, so he come on out. And we heard this noise – ‘nyyyaaa-nya, nyyyaaa-nya.’ And we looked in and saw that thing turned up, and Mamie run in there and grabbed him, she grabbed up John and, oh, she was shaking and shaking and shaking, crying, and I was crying ‘cause I thought he had killed him. So we had him up by the arms, just holding him, just fanning him and fanning him and fanning him, and I was just scared he was gon die. You never know.
“I know he didn’t mean to do it, turn up the bed not thinking ‘bout the child. And then not used to a child being there before he pulled the bed down. And so after that, Mamie said, ‘Let me get out of here.’ ‘Cause you know Mamie and Papa didn’t get along – and she said that he was trying to kill her child. Papa, well, he didn’t know what he’d done. And he was sorry. He said he was so sorry it happened, he wouldn’t hurt that child for nothing in the world. And he was just crazy ‘bout John.
“But Mamie left there that night, honey. She left there with that baby, and she said, ‘I don’t know when I’ll be back here.’ So I got after Papa ‘bout it. And he said he didn’t know the baby was in there. He wouldn’t hurt that baby for nothing. And so Annie Bell [Jacobs Gay, his daughter], she heard about it, and she come over there and laid Papa out. He said he didn’t know the child was there. He said, ‘Well, y’all ought to have taken up the bed when you got out.’ But the child was in there still sleep. ‘But take him up and put him in another room.’ Not put him in that thing so he couldn’t get out.
“So Mamie left there and went on back to Greensboro, and she didn’t never like Papa after that. She didn’t like him no how. She just felt like he did it for meanness, but he didn’t. Then Mamie said, well, she know he was getting old, and so she forgive him ‘cause things like that happen. But at that time, it was just, she never did like him much no how, but look like that just knocked the …. But she said, ‘I’m not gon fault him for doing that. I don’t think he would have did it to the child. He might would do something to me, but….'”
Baby John, circa early 1925, no worse for the wear. That’s my grandmother in the corner.
Papa Jacobs died in 1926, and John Holt lived 90 more years, passing away in New York City in March 2016.
Interview of Hattie H. Ricks by Lisa Y. Henderson adapted and edited for clarity. Copyright 1994, 1996. All rights reserved. Photo in collection of Lisa Y. Henderson.