It does seem incredible to me, despite all my reading of the last 20 or so years, that I'm still coming across new figures from history. Bethany Veney is a case in point.
Bethany Veney was born a slave in Luray Page County, Virginia in 1815. Bethany never met her father and her mother died when she was nine years old. Her master, James Fletcher, died soon afterwards and Bethany became the property of his daughter, Lucy Fletcher. Bethany married Jerry, a fellow slave, but after a year he managed to escape. In December, 1858, Bethany and her son Joe were sold for $775 to a man in Rhode Island. However, after the Civil War she obtained her freedom and in 1889 published her 47 page autobiography, A Slave Woman.
See full text at http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/veney/veney.html
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Angela Allison, Coventry UK
"I know the one thing we did right,
was the day we started to fight.
Keep your eyes on the prize, Hold on!"
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