Wilson Mirror, 6 May 1891.
Nineteenth-century publications often rendered African-American speech in ludicrously exaggerated fashion. This small snipper of speech, however, rings true and poetic.
language
Up the road.
This passage appeared in the recent article I posted about Lawyer Sanders and his 35 children. By happenstance, shortly before I saw the column, my mother mentioned learning when she first came to Wilson in the early 1960s that, in local usage, to go “up the road” meant to migrate North. Thus, for reasons we cannot know, shortly after giving birth to a child that did not survive, Dora Clark Sanders joined the Great Migration, leaving her husband and remaining children in Wilson. She did not return.
Colored?
Though the rest of the country was just decade or so from “African-American,” as late as 1975, the term “colored” was ordinary enough that it appeared unselfconsciously in want ads placed in the Wilson Daily Times.
Wilson Daily Times, 5 August 1971.
Wilson Daily Times, 20 March 1975.