From Slavery to Socialism: Williana and Charles
The Joneses: Williana's story
Sometime
in 1855, on a Louisiana plantation, a slave girl named Sarah Dotson was
born. My father wrote, “Grandma was the
issue of my coal-black great-grandmother and an Irish overseer. Grandma had two younger half-sisters, Aunt
Mary and Aunt Lizzy, who were the legitimate -- if there was such a word during
slavery -- daughters of my great-grandmother and her husband -- or rather the
Negro male the Man permitted her to copulate with.”
As
a house slave, Sarah began her work life very young. At the age of only three or four, she said,
she was perched up on a box “to busy herself with dish-washing.”
Sarah was about 12 or 13 when slavery was abolished by the Emancipation
Proclamation, but
relatively few slaves actually became free at this point; many slaves did not
find out they were free until the passage of the 13th Amendment to the
Constitution on Dec. 18, 1865. Family
lore has it that when Sarah, Mary, and Lizzy finally found out, some three
years later, they left the plantation and, hand in hand, walked north to see
what the world had to offer them.
They
settled in Petersburg, Virginia, a town in Dinwoodie County. Here Sarah married a Mr. William R. Jones,
and they had five children: two who died
unrecorded, my grandmother, Williana, born January 2, 1882, my great-uncle
Gordon H., born February 22, 1883, and a second little girl, Nellie Coleman
Jones, born September 8, 1884.
The
Petersburg census records for 1870 list what looks like a very similar family:
Jones, James 23 M B carriage
driver
Jones, Sarah 22 F M keep
house
Jones, Alice 2 F M
The
initials MB and FM stand
for Male Black and Female Mulatto. My heart leapt when I found this entry, till
I recollected that the baby should be Williana, not Alice (by coincidence,
Alice happened to be the name of my paternal grandfather’s mother.) And later I realized that the year was way
too early. Still, ever since, I can’t help but picture my great-grandparents
taking a drive down Petersburgh’s main street in Mr. Jones’ carriage.
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