Tiney Shaw

Tiney Shaw was 76 when Mary A. Hicks interviewed her in Wake County, North Carolina. Her father, Madison Medlin, was born free, she said, because his father was his mother's enslaver, and under the custom she described such children were free from birth. Even so, during the war the family lived on Susy Page's place and was treated just like the enslaved. Her mother was a pretty, slim brown-skinned woman, said to be named for Betsy Ross. Tiney had four brothers, Allison, William, Jeems and John, and five sisters, Cynthy Ann, Nancy, Sally, Caroline and Holly.

She remembered April, when the Union soldiers came, and the widowed mistress crying because her crops were just planted and she knew she was ruined. Tiney hid under the wash bench, but an officer dragged her out and sent her for a dozen eggs. When she dropped one, she hid under the bed, and he cracked his whip until she came out, then made her drink a whole cup of molasses from the barrel in the hall. Later he pulled the barrel's stopper out for meanness and laughed as her mother waded through the molasses "like a turkey walking on cockleburs." She said many Black people who had never been whipped by an enslaver got whipped by Union soldiers, and that the robbers who stayed around Raleigh afterward were worse than the Klan.