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.)

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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.