Lucindy Lawrence Jurdon

Lucindy Lawrence Jurdon was born in 1858 in Macon, Georgia, to Emanuel and Patsy Lawrence of Jasper County, and was the oldest of three, with a sister, Jennie, and a brother, Phillip. They were enslaved by LeRoy Lawrence on a plantation of three or four hundred acres, forty miles from town. Her mother was a fine weaver for both the white and Black households, and Lucindy still had her mother's spinning wheel and used it; when told her picture would be taken, she brought it out and posed proudly beside it.

She said that anyone caught trying to read or write risked having their forefinger cut off. She remembered courting by walking out to gather chestnuts and wearing them strung around the neck, all-night Saturday dances to hand-clapping, beaten pans, quills and banjo, and corn-shucking songs. An old sick man was freed before emancipation and lived in a room he dug into the ground, propped with rafters. When interviewed in her bare Lee County, Alabama, cabin, with her oldest grandson sick with pneumonia in the next room, she said times were hard and they needed help badly.