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918 W. Ninth Street, Little Rock, Arkansas
Age Between 50 and 60 ?
"My grandfather on my mother's side was a slave. After my mother had been dead for years, I went to Georgia
where he was. I never had seen him before and I would always want to see him, because I had heard my mother
speak of him being alive and he would write to her sometimes. I said if I ever got to la grown and my grandfather
stayed alive, I was going to Georgia to see him. So the first opportunity I got I went. That was a long time ago. If I'd
waited till now he'd a been dead. He's been dead now for years. He lived a long time after I visited him. His name
was John Crocker. He lived in Marshallville, Georgia.
"I couldn't tell how he and my mother got separated. I don't know. I don't believe I ever heard her say. In Georgia
when she was quite a girl, I think she said some of her people left Georgia and went to Covington, Tennessee. Some
of the white people that was connected with them in slavery were named Hollinsheds and my auntie went in that
name. That is, her husband did. My mother's name was Adelaide Crocker. She was never a slave. Her mother was.
"My mother and father had children--twelve of them. I don't know how many children my grandparents had. I know
three uncles--William, Harmon, and Matthew. They were all my grandmother's children and they were Flewellens.
She married a Flewellen. Those were my father's brothers. My auntie's husband was named Dick Hollinshed. They
all come from Georgia. ------- "It comes to me now. I remember hearing my mother say once that her father was
sold. I think she said that her father was sold from her mother. She didn't seem to know much about it--only what
she heard her father say.
"A man came through the country when I was a girl before my mother died. She died when I was young. He came
to our house and he said he was a relative of my mother's and he went on to tell what he knew of her folks in slave
times. By him telling so much about her folks, she thought he really was related to her. But after he left, she found
out that he was just a fraud. He was going 'round throughout the country making it by claiming he was related to
different people. I don't know how he found out so much about the different people he stopped with. I suppose there
was a lot of people made it that way.
"I don't know what my grandparents did in slavery time. When I did see my grandfather, he was able to do anything.
He didn't live so long after I seen him. My mother's mother was dead and he had married another woman. I never
did see my grandmother. I do remember seeing one of my granduncles. But I was so small I don't remember how he
looked.
"I used to hear my grandma say that they weren't allowed to have a church service and that they used to go out way
off and sing and pray and they'd have to turn a pot down to keep the noise from going out. I don't know just how
they fixed the pot.
"I had one auntie named Jane Hunter. When she died, she was one hundred and one years old. She married Rev. K.
Hunter over here in North Little Rock. She had been married twice. She was married to Dick Hollinshed the first
time. She's been dead ten years.
She was thirty-eight years old when Emancipation came. She baked the first sacrament bread for the C. M. E.
Church when it was organized in 1870.
"My grandmother lived a hundred years too. That was my father's mother. I knew both of them. My grandmother
lived with us. That is, she lived with us a while when my mother died. She lived here a while before she died, and
then she went back to Georgia because she had a son there named William Flewellen. He is a presiding elder in the
C. M. E. church, in Georgia.
"My father was a railroad man and when my mother did anything at all, she worked in the field. My father farmed
during the time when he was working on the railroad.
"I have heard my grandmother talk about slaves being put on the block and sold and then meeting way years after
and not knowing one another. She told me about a woman who was separated from her son. One day, years after
slavery, when she had married again and had a family, she and her husband got to talking about old slave times. She
told him about how she had been sold away from her baby son when he was a little thing. She told him how he had
a certain scar on his arm. Her husband had a similar scar and he got to talking about slave times, and they found out
that they were mother and son. He left her and went on his way sad because he didn't want to stay on living as
husband with his mother. I don't think those people were held accountable for that, do you?"
Cora Horton is the first president of the Woman's Missionary Society composed of the societies of the three
Arkansas C. M. E. Conferences. She has been president of the Annual Conference division of the Woman's Home
Missionary Society of the Little Rock Conference for about seven years. She visits all meetings of the General
Conference and the General Board of the C. M. E. church as well as all connectional meetings of the Little Rock
Conference, and such meetings of the Arkansas and Southwest Conferences as relate to the discharge of her duties
as president of the State Woman's Home Missionary Society organization.
She has been president of the N. C. Cleves Club of Bullock Temple C. M. E. Church of Little Rock for seven years
and is a most active church worker as will be seen from this comment. In her worship she represents the traditional
Negro type, but she buys the current issue of the C. M. E. Church Discipline and is well acquainted with its
provisions relating to her specific church work as well as to all ordinary phases of church work and administration.
There is a lot of drama in her story of the mother who unwittingly married her son.
There is an interesting sidelight on slavery separations in this interview. Never had it occurred to me that imposters
among Negroes might seize upon the idea of missing relatives as the basis for a confidence scheme.
There is also an interesting sidelight on C. M. E. Church history in the naming of Jane Hunter as the woman who
baked the first sacrament bread at the organization of that Church in 1870.
Name of interviewer Thomas Elmore Lucy"
