- Born
- About 1852 (age 85 when interviewed)
- Interviewed in
- North Carolina
- Age when photographed
- 75
Tina Johnson
Tina Johnson was 85 and living on South Bloodworth Street in Raleigh, North Carolina, when Mary A. Hicks interviewed her. She was born in Richmond County, Georgia, to Cass, and took her surname from a General Johnson; she never knew who her father was. Her mother belonged to a Mrs. Berry, and Tina and her brother Dennis worked in the cotton patch on coarse food and clothing.
By the time Sherman came, they had moved near Augusta. They believed his army passed them by because his sister lived in Augusta. Tina never saw a Union soldier, but for two days and nights she heard the guns roaring and felt the earth shake like an earthquake, the air dark and stinging with powder. After the surrender they stayed on through the Ku Klux terror; she remembered the Klan breaking up a Black dance and whipping all the dancers. Several years after the war her mother married John Curtis in the Baptist church in Augusta, with Tina and Dennis watching. When a white man once asked if she knew her parents were married before she was born, she answered that she wondered if he knew whether his own were.
They came to Raleigh before things settled down after the war, when she saw freedpeople living on kush, cornbread, molasses and whatever they could beg or take. "Them days sure was bad."
From the Federal Writers' Project slave narratives, 1936–1938. The interviewers wrote down their words in the 1930s, often in dialect spellings that reflect the interviewer more than the speaker.