Henderson

On his 90th birthday.

My father had a brief career as a journalist his sophomore year in high school covering Darden football games for the Wilson Daily Times under the byline “Skip Henderson.” By his senior year, he was editor of Darden’s yearbook. His writing career ended there, but he spent the rest of his educational life in sports, as a player, coach, and mentor.

Rederick C. Henderson would have turned 90 today. I miss him to my core and not a day passes that I don’t think of him and give thanks for all poured into those he loved.

Wilson Daily Times, 29 September 1950.

 

Wilson Daily Times, 27 October 1950.

Editor-in-chief R.C. Henderson, front, with some of the annual staff. From “The Trojan,” the yearbook of C.H. Darden High School, 1952.

Family ties, no. 12: great big old black ones.

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 eleventh in a series of excerpts and adaptations of interviews with my grandmother Hattie Henderson Ricks (1910-2001), Jesse and Sarah’s adopted daughter (and Sarah’s great-niece), revealing the ways her Wilson family stayed connected to their far-flung kin. (Or didn’t.)

——

It’s muscadine season. In my grandmother’s day, and even well into mine, bronze muscadines — scuppernongs — were called scuffalongs, and, as I gorge like a squirrel approaching winter, I am always reminded of one of my grandmother’s favorite stories. Her great-uncle, James Lucian Henderson, who lived near Dudley in southern Wayne County, grew grapes for his church’s Communion wine — and they were off-limits:

“Great big old black ones. Lord, he might as well have told me to go out there and eat all I wanted. I eat all the way down the corn row down to that lady’s house, Mary Budd, and come up through the corn field and come back to the road and went over there stood up there and eat all I want and throwed the hulls over in the pasture. The hog pasture, or whatever that thing was out there where pigs was. They thought I was gon give ‘em something to eat, I reckon. And I throwed the things over there, and I reckon that’s where Uncle Lucian discovered that we was eating ‘em. And he said, “Y’all stay away from out there! Somebody’s been out there —!”  “Wont me!” [She laughs.]  Them things seem like was the best things I ever had. And the arbor there on the yard where was all up in the trees, it’d be grapes. And I’d go there and eat them, but they was little. It was what they call scuffalongs. White grapes. And I’d eat them, too, but I wanted some of them old big ones. Them old big black ones.”

Georgia muscadines, which are not quite as delectable as North Carolina’s, but will absolutely make do.

Interview of Hattie H. Ricks by Lisa Y. Henderson; all rights reserved. Photo by Lisa Y. Henderson, August 2024.

Family ties, no. 11: going down to Dudley.

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 eleventh in a series of excerpts and adaptations of interviews with my grandmother Hattie Henderson Ricks (1910-2001), Jesse and Sarah’s adopted daughter (and Sarah’s great-niece), revealing the ways her Wilson family stayed connected to their far-flung kin. (Or didn’t.)

Minnie Lee Simmons Budd was Sarah Henderson Jacobs’ niece, the daughter of her sister Ann Elizabeth Henderson Simmons. Minnie, a dressmaker, and her husband Jesse M. Budd married in 1904 and migrated to Philadelphia around 1905. They returned to Wayne County for several years, then settled permanently in Philadelphia in the 1920s. Both their sons died young, and Minnie asked to adopt my grandmother, but Mama Sarah would not split her and sister Mamie Henderson Holt. (Minnie later reared several of her brother Daniel Simmons’ children after their mother died.) In the late 1950s, my grandmother migrated to Philadelphia, and she and Cousin Minnie were regular visitors until Minnie’s death in 1960.

——

“Cousin Minnie she had a piano – that’s a piano there, and when you come in her front door on the right hand side, that room where it set, that was her living room. This was their house in Mount Olive. And when I went down there to stay with her two weeks, and she was practicing and playing the piano, she wanted to learn how to play the piano. Well, I guess she had already learnt. But the house was nice, nobody but her and Uncle Jesse.  She wanted to adopt me. I used to go down there and stay with her and Cousin Jesse. And Cousin Cousin Annie Cox and Uncle Hardy Cox was living at that time, and I used to go down there. I stayed with her when Cousin Jesse, her husband, come up to bring tobacco to sell. They used to bring it to Wilson, and I went with them back on the car. They had a truck one time, and then they had the car. And they’d just come up and visit. Mama was living then.”

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.

BLACK WIDE-AWAKE POST #6000! THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT!

Henderson Family Reunion 2024.

I’m just back in Atlanta from the Henderson Family Reunion. We are from southern Wayne County, just below Wilson County, but my line arrived in Wilson about 1905 — a story I told here.

Our reunion brings together descendants of the children of James Henderson, a free man of color born about 1815. My line is that of his first son, my great-great-great-grandfather Lewis Henderson, who was alive when my grandmother Hattie Henderson Ricks was born. Lewis’ daughter Sarah Henderson Jacobs Silver was the first in the family to settle in Wilson. She reared her sister Loudie Henderson’s children Bessie Henderson and Jack Henderson and Bessie’s children (my grandmother and great-aunt Mamie Henderson Holt), and nearly 40 of their descendants were among the almost 150 Hendersons in Goldsboro this weekend.

I gave a family history presentation Saturday morning at First Congregational United Church of Christ, the church in Dudley that Lewis Henderson helped found in 1870. My cousins still attend the church; one was guest pastor yesterday. The church cemetery — where my great-great-great-grandparents, great-great-grandmother and her siblings, great-grandmother, and innumerable cousins are buried — is right down the road.

The headstone of Cora Q. Henderson, daughter of Lucian and Susan Henderson — my great-grandmother’s 23 year-old first cousin.

Lewis Henderson died in 1912, and his wife Margaret Balkcum Henderson in 1915. By then, only James Lucian Henderson, their elder son, remained in Dudley. Twice a week, Sarah walked from Elba Street down to Wilson’s A.C.L. depot and handed up to a porter a shoebox packed with cornbread and ham and sweet potatoes. At Dudley, he threw the box off the train to a cousin waiting on the ditch bank. And thus Uncle Lucian and Aunt Susie were fed.

The Dudley depot is gone, but these tracks still run to Wilson.

Nearly 120 years after my Hendersons left Wayne County, the links remain.

Photos by Lisa Y. Henderson, July 2024.

Finding light on this bitter anniversary.

Rederick C. Henderson, about 1951.

I was talking to a friend a few days ago, and she said, laughing, “I never once spoke with your dad, but I swear I can hear him.” I don’t recall exactly what I said, but it was some pithy aphorism or another, and Rederick C. Henderson was the king of same, so she paid me the ultimate compliment.

I miss this man mightily and can hardly believe today marks two years since he left. Not a day goes by that I don’t feel him with me, and I am grateful for all he was in life and beyond.

Family ties, no. 9: just fanning him and fanning him and fanning him.

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.)

——

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.

Research tip: the fallibility of records.

A caution: even “official records” may contain erroneous information. Late into the twentieth century, birthdates could be guesstimates; parentage c0uld reflect informal adoptions, rather biological fact; names, both first and last, could shift or change, and spellings fell to the whim or talents of the inscriber. Oral history can be helpful when sifting through competing versions of facts to arrive at (or get reasonably close to) truth.

Here’s an example:

The “true facts” — Jesse Henderson was the son of Loudie Henderson and Joseph Buckner Martin. He was born about 1893 near Dudley, in southern Wayne County, North Carolina, and moved to Wilson as a teenager. There, he was nicknamed “Jack” by Jefferson D. Farrior to distinguish him from Jesse A. Jacobs Jr., the uncle with whom he lived and worked at Farrior’s livery stable.

On 3 Dec 1914, Solomon Ward applied for a marriage license for Jesse Henderson of Wilson, age 21, colored, son of Jesse Jacobs and Sarah Jacobs, both dead, and Pauline Artis of Wilson, age 18, colored, daughter of Alice Artis.  They were married later that day.

Sarah Henderson Jacobs was Jesse Henderson’s maternal aunt. She and her husband Jesse A. Jacobs Jr. were Jesse Henderson’s foster parents and were very much alive in 1914.

In November 1936, Jesse Henderson, using the name Jack, applied for a Social Security number.

By reporting his first name as “Jack” rather than Jesse to the Social Security Administration, Jesse Henderson essentially effectuated a name change. (It was so effective that few of his descendants would remember the name he was given at birth. He was Jesse in the 1910 and 1920 censuses and when he registered for the World War I draft, but Jack in the 1930 census and thereafter.)

The names Jack provided for his parents on this application are both inaccurate and puzzling. Lewis Henderson was, in fact, his grandfather. “Ludy” (or Loudie) was his mother’s first name, but she was Loudie Henderson, not Jacobs. As noted above, Jacobs was the surname of the uncle and aunt who reared him after Loudie died in childbirth.

In a further inaccuracy, note Jack’s birthdate: 16 Sept 1892. The 1900 census lists Jack Henderson’s birth month and year as February 1892, and his draft registration card only as 1893, month and day unknown.

Finally, when Jack Henderson died in 1970, one of his daughters provided information for his death certificate, naming his parents as an unknown father and “Lucy (?) Henderson” (and his birthdate as 21 April 1898.)

“Lucy” certainly was Loudie. My grandmother Hattie Henderson Ricks remembered her great-grandmother’s name variously as “Loudie” or “Lucy,” but a church record and a single census entry, in 1880, confirm that it was Loudie. God only knows Jack’s birthday, but the year was probably 1892 or 1893, as reflected in the 1900 census and on his Social Security application.

How the Hendersons came to Wilson.

My paternal grandmother’s family arrived in Wilson circa 1905 from southern Wayne County, North Carolina. Jesse and Sarah Henderson Jacobs came first, and Sarah’s teenaged nephew Jesse “Jack” Henderson arrived a few years later. My grandmother Hattie Mae Henderson was born in Dudley in June 1910. In six months or so, her 19 year-old mother Bessie Henderson was dead.

Said my grandmother:

“I thought of many times I wondered what my mama looked like. Bessie. And how old was she, or whatever. Looked at Jack, and I said, they say he was 17 years old when he come to Wilson. From down there in Dudley, down there in Wayne County.

“My mama was helping Grandpa, Grandpa Lewis [Henderson.]  The pig got out of the pasture and, instead of going all the way down to where the gate opened, she run him back in there, to try to coax him in there. They picked him up. They picked him up and put him over the fence. And when they picked him up, and put him over the fence, she had the heavy part, I reckon, or something, and she felt a pain, a sharp pain, and so then she started spitting blood. Down in the country, they ain’t had no doctor or nothing, they just thought she was gon be all right. And I don’t think they even took her to the doctor. Well, she would have had to go to Goldsboro or Mount Olive, one, and doctors was scarce at that time, too, even if it was where you had to go a long ways to get them. Or go to a hospital and stay. And so she died. She didn’t never get over it. You never know what you’ll come to.

“But I don’t remember ever staying down there. ‘Cause they brought me up to Wilson to live with Mama and Papa [Sarah and Jesse Jacobs]. I stayed with them after Bessie died. I don’t remember Bessie. But my sister Mamie says she remembers her.”

At left, the only known photograph of Bessie Henderson (1891-1911). At right, a colorized version, which highlights surprising details of the backdrop. Does anyone recognize these trees and white ducks from an early twentieth-century Goldsboro or Mount Olive photography studio?

Adapted from interviews of Hattie H. Ricks by Lisa Y. Henderson, 1996 and 1998, all rights reserved; photo in collection of Lisa Y. Henderson.