The fieldworker provided only a summary of Rosa Barber’s narrative. Rosa Barber was born into slavery on the Fox Ellison plantation at North Carden, North Carolina, in 1861. She was four years old when she was freed, so her memory of slavery was confined to the short period of her childhood in North Carolina. Her recollection of the days before and immediately following the Civil War came mainly from stories related to her by her parents.
Her maiden name—taken from her master, as was the custom—was Rosa Fox Ellison. When they were freed, her parents took her from the plantation, and they lived in different places. When she was quite young, her parents died, and she later married another ex-slave from the Fox Ellison plantation, whose name, Fox Ellison, also was taken from the plantation owner. She and her husband lived together forty-three years until his death, and they had nine children. After the death of Fox Ellison, Rosa married again; she also outlived her second husband. She was a seventy-six-year-old widow when she was interviewed.
Rosa recalled that her parents spoke of no extreme discipline on the Fox Ellison plantation; however, slaves were not taught the three Rs, and they were forbidden to even look in a book or at any other printed material. She had no pictures. Even traditional rhymes and tales were forbidden if they were thought to convey any direct or indirect knowledge or in any other way enlighten or uplift the spirits of the slaves. The slaves found consolation mainly in their field songs. As a child in North Carolina, Rosa played with rag dolls or a ball of yarn, if she had enough old string to make one. Any toy considered educational was forbidden.