Margaret E. Dickens

Margaret Elvira Dickens was born free on June 5, 1861, in Raleigh, North Carolina, and showed her interviewer the entry in her father's own handwriting recording her birth. Her mother, Mary Ann Hews, was freeborn; her father, Henry Byrd, was a free carpenter who built houses. He bought the lot where Margaret still lived in 1848, and she still had the deed, which bore his signature while the seller signed with his mark. Her mother's father was a cabinetmaker who made coffins and furniture. She said free Black men had no real protection then: if a white customer didn't like a piece of work, he could beat its maker and walk away. When Union troops came through, her mother hid her best woolen counterpane, and the soldiers, who took whatever they wanted, never found it.

She could read and write. With her first husband, the Rev. Samuel E. Reynolds, she lived for years in the North, in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Providence, Rhode Island; Brooklyn; and Elmira, New York, wherever he preached, but they came home to Raleigh, where he died in the family house. In 1920 she married Charles W. Dickens, whose own story is also in this collection. She lived at 1115 East Lenoir Street, on the land her father bought, drank from the well dug for the first house there, and said she meant to keep holding on to her home.