Adora Rienshaw

Adora Rienshaw was 92 and living at 431 South Bloodworth Street in Raleigh, North Carolina, when Mary A. Hicks interviewed her. Unlike most people in this collection, she was never enslaved. She was born at Beulah, where Garner now stands, to Cameron and Sally Perry, and moved to Raleigh as an infant. Her family was known as "Free Issues."

She explained that her father was born free because his mother was a white woman, the wife of a man named Perry in Mississippi, and his father was that household's enslaved coachman. Her father was bound out until he was 21 and then came to Raleigh, where he worked as a blacksmith on Wolcott's Corner. She had two siblings, Charlie and Narcissus. Before the war a judge's wife taught them to read in secret; afterward she attended a school the Union started and taught the younger children for several years. She remembered Confederate soldiers burning the Raleigh depot and families getting salt by boiling the dirt from smokehouse floors. "I'm glad slavery is over," she said, "even though I never was a slave."