Sarah Harris

Sarah Harris was born in April 1861 on the plantation of John William Walton in North Carolina, to Frank and Flora Walton. Her brothers were Lang and Johnny, and her sisters Hannah, Mary, Ellen, Violet and Annie. She said her grandmother, Ellen Walton, lived to 104 and her mother to 103. She remembered the Union soldiers as "the prettiest blue men I ever seed," chasing chickens and guineas and sharing the meat with the Black families while most of the white people hid. When the family left the plantation, they lived on hardtack, potatoes and salt meat from the Freedmen's Bureau, and little Sarah cried every day at noon to go home; her father told her to stay because they would send her to school. Her father later worked as a butler and her mother as a cook for Bill Crawford.

When she was big enough she went to work for 25 cents a week plus board, and she ran all the way home to give her first quarter to her mother, who saved it, some weeks only five cents, until she could buy a home when land sold for $10 an acre. She married Silas Cooper of Norfolk, who worked in the navy yard, in a church wedding in Raleigh.

She never learned to read or write. "I think slavery was wrong," she said. "I have a horror of being a slave." She pointed out that the land all around her now belonged to Black families who had been "cut off with nothing" but were "coming on fast," and said the Bible promised that the bottom rail would be on top.