Just how old Mrs. Jackson is, she herself doesn’t know, but she thinks she is about 105 years old.  She looks much younger.  Her youngest child is 73 and she had nine, two of whom were twins.  Born a slave in Virginia, record of her birth was kept by the master.  She cannot remember her father as he was soon sold after Mrs. Jackson’s death [TR:  birth?].  When still a child she was taken from her mother and sold.  She remembers the auction block and that she brought a good price as she was strong and healthy.  Her new master, Tom Robinson, treated her well and never beat her.  At first she was a plough hand, working in the cotton fields, but then she was taken into the house to be a maid.  While there the Civil War broke out.  Mrs. Jackson remembers the excitement and the coming and going.  Gradually the family lost its wealth, the home was broken up.  Everything was destroyed by the armies.  Then came freedom for the slaves.  But Mrs. Jackson stayed on with the master for awhile.  After leaving she went to Alabama where she obtained work in a laundry “ironing white folks’ collars and cuffs.”  Then she got married and in 1917 she came to live with her daughter in Fort Wayne.  Her husband, Levy Jackson, has been dead 50 years.  Of her children, only two are left.  Mrs. Jackson is sometimes very lonesome for her old home in “Alabamy”, where her friends lived, but for the most part, she is happy and contented.

Federal Writers’ Project
of the W.P.A. 
District #6
Marion County
Anna Pritchett
1200 Kentucky Avenue

Folklore
Mrs. Lizzie Johnson
706 North Senate Avenue, Apt. 1

Mrs. Johnson’s father, Arthur Locklear, was born in Wilmington, N.C. in 1822.  He lived in the South and endured many hardships until 1852.  He was very fortunate in having a white man befriend him in many ways.  This man taught him to read and write.  Many nights after a hard days work, he would lie on the floor in front of the fireplace, trying to study by the light from the blazing wood, so he might improve his reading and writing.

He married very young, and as his family increased, he became ambitious for them.  Knowing their future would be very dark if they remained South.

He then started a movement to come north.  There were about twenty-six or twenty-eight men and women, who had the same thoughts about their children, banded together, and in 1852 they started for somewhere, North.

The people selected, had to be loyal to the cause of their children’s future lives, morally clean, truthful, and hard-working.

Some had oxen, some had carts.  They pooled all of their scant belongings, and started on their long hard journey.

The women and children rode in the ox-carts, the men walked.  They would travel a few days, then stop on the roadside to rest.  The women would wash their few clothes, cook enough food to last a few days more, then they would start out again.  They were six weeks making the trip.