Interviewer: Samuel S. Taylor
Person interviewed: Cora L. Horton
918 W. Ninth Street, Little Rock, Arkansas
Age: Between 50 and 60?
“My grandfather on my mother’s side was a slave. After my mother had been dead for years, I went to Georgia where he was. I never had seen him before and I would always want to see him, because I had heard my mother speak of him being alive and he would write to her sometimes. I said if I ever got to be grown and my grandfather stayed alive, I was going to Georgia to see him. So the first opportunity I got I went. That was a long time ago. If I’d waited till now he’d a been dead. He’s been dead now for years. He lived a long time after I visited him. His name was John Crocker. He lived in Marshallville, Georgia.
“I couldn’t tell how he and my mother got separated. I don’t know. I don’t believe I ever heard her say. In Georgia when she was quite a girl, I think she said some of her people left Georgia and went to Covington, Tennessee. Some of the white people that was connected with them in slavery were named Hollinsheds and my auntie went in that name. That is, her husband did. My mother’s name was Adelaide Crocker. She was never a slave. Her mother was.
“My mother and father had children—twelve of them. I don’t know how many children my grandparents had. I know three uncles—William, Harmon, and Matthew. They were all my grandmother’s children and they were Flewellens. She married a Flewellen. Those were my father’s brothers. My auntie’s husband was named Dick Hollinshed. They all come from Georgia.
“It comes to me now. I remember hearing my mother say once that her father was sold. I think she said that her father was sold from her mother. She didn’t seem to know much about it—only what she heard her father say.
“A man came through the country when I was a girl before my mother died. She died when I was young. He came to our house and he said he was a relative of my mother’s and he went on to tell what he knew of her folks in slave times. By him telling so much about her folks, she thought he really was related to her. But after he left, she found out that he was just a fraud. He was going ’round throughout the country making it by claiming he was related to different people. I don’t know how he found out so much about the different people he stopped with. I suppose there was a lot of people made it that way.
“I don’t know what my grandparents did in slavery time. When I did see my grandfather, he wasn’t able to do anything. He didn’t live so long after I seen him. My mother’s mother was dead and he had married another woman. I never did see my grandmother. I do remember seeing one of my granduncles. But I was so small I don’t remember how he looked.
“I used to hear my grandma say that they weren’t allowed to have a church service and that they used to go out way off and sing and pray and they’d have to turn a pot down to keep the noise from going out. I don’t know just how they fixed the pot.
“I had one auntie named Jane Hunter. When she died, she was one hundred and one years old. She married Rev. K. Hunter over here in North Little Rock. She had been married twice. She was married to Dick Hollinshed the first time. She’s been dead ten years. She was thirty-eight years old when Emancipation came. She baked the first sacrament bread for the C. M. E. Church when it was organized in 1870.
“My grandmother lived a hundred years too. That was my father’s mother. I knew both of them. My grandmother lived with us. That is, she lived with us a while when my mother died. She lived here a while before she died, and then she went back to Georgia because she had a son there named William Flewellen. He is a presiding elder in the C. M. E. church, in Georgia.