“Dear, let’s go in my parlor,” she suggested in a cultured voice.  “I wouldn’t dare go out on the front porch wearing this dirty dress.  It simply isn’t my way of living.”  Mary is about five feet tall and wears her straight, snowy-white hair in a neat knot low on the back of her head.  The sparkle in her bright brown eyes bespeaks a more youthful spirit than her wrinkled and almost white face would indicate.  She was wearing a soiled print dress, brown cotton hose, and high-topped black shoes.  In remarkably good English for one of her race she told that her daughter’s family lives with her, “so that I won’t be right by myself.”  Then she began her story: 

“Honey, what is it you want me to tell you.  Where was I born?  Oh, my child!  I was born right here in dear old hilly Athens.  Yes, that’s where I was born.  Polly Crawford was my mother, and she belonged to Major William H. Crawford before he gave her to his son, Marse John Crawford.  Now about my father, that is the dream.  He died when I was just a little child.  They said he was Sandy Thomas and that he was owned by Marster Obadiah Thomas, who lived in Oglethorpe County.  All I can remember about my grandparents is this:  When I found my grandma, Hannah Crawford, she was living on Major Crawford’s plantation, where Crawford, Georgia, is now.  Grandma was a little, bitty woman; so little that she wore a number one shoe.  She was brought here from Virginia to be a field hand, but she was smart as a whip, and lived to be 118 years old.  I used to tell my mother that I wished I was named Hannah for her, and so Mother called me Mary Hannah.

“I can’t bring my grandfather to mind very clearly.  I do remember that my mother took me to Penfield to see him, and told me if I wasn’t a good little girl he would surely whip me.  They called him ‘Uncle Campfire’, because he had such a fiery temper.  For a living, after he got to be an old man, he made cheers (chairs), but for the life of me I don’t know who he belonged to, because Major Crawford sold him before I was born.

“There were five of us children:  Nat, Solomon, Susannah, Sarah, and myself.  Marse John gave Solomon to his daughter, Miss Fannie, when she married Marse William H. Gerdine.  Susannah belonged to Miss Rosa Golden, and Sarah and I belonged to the other Miss Fannie.  She was Marse John’s sister.  Nat was Marse John’s house boy, and our mother was his cook.  We children just played around the yard until we were large enough to work.

“Yes, my dear, I was born in Marse John’s back yard.  He lived in a two-story frame house on Dougherty Street, back of Scudder’s School.  The two slave houses and the kitchen were set off from the house a little piece out in the yard.  It was the style then to have the kitchen built separate from the dwelling house.