Sarah Frances Shaw Graves

Sarah Frances Shaw Graves, called Aunt Sally, was born March 23, 1850, in Kentucky near Louisville. Her mother was enslaved by a man named Shaw, who "allotted" her, a kind of hire on a down payment and mortgage, to Jimmie Graves. When Sarah was six months old, Graves moved to Missouri to live with his daughter, Emily Graves Crowdes, taking Sarah and her mother and leaving her father behind in Kentucky, allotted to another man. Her parents never learned where the other had gone. Sarah said the enslavers deliberately kept her mother from knowing, so she would remarry and have more children to be enslaved. Her mother vowed never to bear children in slavery again, and married Trattle Barber because he was too sick ever to father a child. Since he couldn't work, Sarah and her mother worked all the harder.

As a baby Sarah lay on a pallet by the fence while her mother plowed. She carried water to the field hands, three big buckets at a time, one in each hand and one on her head. She grated corn on punched tin for meal, and gathered wool caught on fences to make mittens. Her mother's enslaver, she said, "whipped his slaves for pastime"; Sarah herself had many whippings, some for things the enslaver's children did. When freed she took Shaw's name, and her husband took the name Graves from the man who had owned him. When interviewed at nearly 88, she lived in a neat, comfortable home with a telephone and radio near Skidmore, Nodaway County, Missouri, and was waiting on the porch in a starched dress when the interviewer arrived.