Josephine Smith

Josephine Smith was 94 and living at 1010 Mark Street in Raleigh, North Carolina, when Mary A. Hicks interviewed her. She was born in Norfolk, Virginia, and didn't know who first enslaved her, but she remembered being put on the block in Richmond as a toddler. She and her mother brought a thousand dollars together. Her father belonged to someone else, and they were sold away from him "just like the cow is sold away from the bull." A preacher named Maynard bought them and took them to Franklinton, North Carolina, and when his daughter married Dr. John Leach of Johnston County, Josephine was given to her.

She saw many sales, with people in chains and speculators buying and selling, and a drove of people wearing nothing but rags being galloped before buyers. The worst thing she ever saw was at Louisburg on a hot August day: a woman who had been sold away from her three-week-old baby was being marched in a chained coffle toward New Orleans. While the speculators ate, she begged Josephine in God's name for water, and Josephine gave it to her. A little way down the road the woman collapsed and died, and the traders buried her by the roadside, cursing, Josephine was told, about the money they had lost.

After the war she worked in Raleigh and as a cook at a hotel in Louisburg, where she learned that a woman named Melissa was her sister and went and got her. A few years later she married Alex Dunson, who had been a body servant to a Confederate officer through the whole war. They lived together about sixty years, until he died the night before Thanksgiving in 1923. Slavery wasn't good, she said, "because it divided families."