Jennylin Dunn

Jennylin Dunn was 87 and living at 315 Bledsoe Avenue in Raleigh, North Carolina, when Mary A. Hicks interviewed her. She was born in Wake County. She, her parents Isaac and Liza, and her sisters Lucy, Candice and Harriet, along with about six others, were enslaved by Betsy Lassiter. A brother died before she could remember him.

What stuck in her mind most was watching sales from the block in front of the Raleigh courthouse, where she saw mothers sold away from their babies many times, and the mourning that followed. She feared the patrollers and named two of them who were said to whip people scandalously. When Union troops approached, the enslaved children were told the soldiers ate Black children, so they stayed hidden.

After the war her parents brought the family to Raleigh, where she lived from then on. The Union sent teachers, but most families were too busy scrambling to make a living to go to school. She said she reckoned it was better that slavery ended.