Bethania, NC. 1838 – 1865.
Henry Wilson moved to Bethania with his wife and two young daughters in the fall of 1838. He purchased Cherry Grove Plantation, a forty acre farm tract. For the first 12 years, annually, he planted corn, potatoes, green beans, and wheat; also, he herded dairy cows. With only daughters and no sons to work the fields with him, he worked alone from sunrise to sunset to provide for his family. White men in Bethania scoffed at his “self-righteousness” suggesting he buy slaves to do the work. Wilson resisted, adamantly, saying it was pure evil and barbarism for any human being to own another. To further assert that belief, he started a small church in Bethania, Wilson Moravian, where he invited Colored people who lived on nearby farms to attend worship services together with White congregants. Wilson maintained that Colored children, as well as any adults who wanted, should learn how to read and write and be educated, including women and girls. Thereby, he earned the trust and confidence of Colored families in Bethania.
Over the next eight years as Wilson’s daughters grew up and he prepared to send them off to Salem Women’s College, he hired Whites and a few neighboring Colored freedmen from Tobaccoville to tend his fields as tenant farmers. Workers were expected to grow a tobacco crop for sale to RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company in Salem for manufacturing snuff and chewing tobacco products. Wilson paid the workers half the proceeds from the sales and saved the remainder for his daughters’ college fund. However, under this hired labor agreement, Wilson’s neighboring plantation owners continued to outpace his farm in production and profitability by using free slave labor. In 1853 Wilson decided to buy twenty slaves: Annie’s parents, Lonny and Lucy, were among these firsts; and when Annie was born in 1854, she, too, was owned by Wilson.
Over the next 10 years, Wilson’s farm increased from forty to two hundred ten acres and his number of slaves owned from 20 to 127, adults and children.
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After thirty hours of labor, Annie’s baby is delivered.
“Is it a boy?” she asks softly, reaching out to Emma for the baby.
“Yes, Annie…yes, it’s a boy. Let me clean ‘im up,” Emma stammers, clamping off and cutting his umbilical cord, now fully understanding Mr. Wilson’s generosity in letting her stay with Annie until the baby is born while continuing to pay Emma her bakery wages.
“Let me see him!” Annie whispers, urgently.
Emma takes the baby to the kitchen sink, cleans him with a warm, damp cloth, then wraps him in a soft towel. She thumps the bottom of his foot and he begins to cry.
“Let me see my baby!” Annie moans, more loudly.
Emma gives a long, tearful look towards Annie, baby clutched to her chest, then haltingly crosses the room and hands the newborn to his mother. Annie pulls the towel back from his face and gasps. His skin is pale, the color of Love Feast bun dough, his hair is ginger colored and bone straight, and his eyes…his eyes are laurel green like his father’s.
Annie leans forward, holding her baby close, staring wildly at the wall opposite her bed, fixing her gaze on a knot in a pine board plank. She begins to rock, furtively, while emitting a crescendoing mournful wail. She clutches her baby, holding him too close to see him, imagining him the way he was before he became evidence of Henry Wilson’s assault. She remembers having three monthly periods before Wilson used her body that day, saying he wouldn’t hurt her…she was now having her fourth with his baby.
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