There are two texts of interviews with Adeline Rose Lennox in the WPA files. One text, collected by Albert Strope, is dated September 7, 1937, on the copy in the WPA files, but is not dated in Rawick 1972. The other text, reproduced in Rawick 1977, lists the fieldworker as “unknown” and was filed on September 13, 1937, at the South Bend WPA office.
When interviewed, Adeline Rose Lennox was eighty-seven years old. She was living with the Richard Bailey family at 610 Wagner Avenue in Elkhart. Mrs. Bailey’s first husband was Adeline’s son, Johnny Steward, who had died in Tennessee about twenty years before the interview. The fieldworker said that Adeline did not know how to read or write, that she had never talked on a telephone, and that she had never seen a motion picture; however, Adeline said, “I’ve seen and done a lot of things that most folks have missed.” She made no apologies for not having learned to read and write, because she said “none of us slaves was given any education.” She said she had no desire to attend a movie, for “I used to attend circuses, but I quit going years ago. That was just after a circus came to town, down in Tennessee, and brought measles along. After that everybody for miles around had the measles.”
Adeline was born on a tobacco and cotton plantation near Paris, Tennessee, on October 25, 1849. The daughter of slave parents, she spent the first sixteen years of her life as a slave. The plantation on which she was born was owned by Reuben Rose. Adeline told the fieldworker, “We all thought a great deal of Mr. Rose, for he was good to us.” She said Rose’s slaves were well taken care of and well fed, with plenty of corn, peas, beans, and pork to eat. She said she had more pork then than during the Depression. She explained that her parents took the name of Rose, which was her last name until she was married, because it was the custom of slaves to assume the names of their owners.
She remained with her parents on the Reuben Rose plantation until the plantation owner’s son got married. Then, when she was seven years old, “I was carried away from my parents to the farm of the master’s son, Henry Rose, and there I stayed until after the war.” She recalled that she cried when she had to leave her parents, but Henry’s wife told her that she had to go to a new home. At the age of fourteen, Adeline worked in the fields—driving a team, plowing, harrowing, and seeding.
Adeline said she was “treated tol’able” well when she was a slave and maintained, “I’ve worked a heap harder since I was freed than I did before. I was put to work when I was six years old, just like other slave children. We were never worked hard because of our age. We worked in the fields and in the houses. I had plenty to eat as a slave. We lived in little cabins, but we were comfortable, and I never saw one of us black’uns whipped. Our quarters, both on the Reuben Rose plantation and then later on the Henry Rose place, were in log cabins. The floors were dirt, and there were fireplaces built of mud and sticks.” She said that the log houses were located a distance from the plantation owner’s house.
She remembered the Civil War as “the War of the Secession” and recalled hearing the distant roar of cannons “when they were fighting up near Shiloh, Tennessee, and Beauregard was the leader of the Southern army.” She admitted, though, that at the time she “didn’t know what it was about, and it must have been months after the end of the war before I was freed. I never knew much about the war, for of course, our owners didn’t tell us what it was about. I remember soldiers drilling in a field on the Henry Rose farm, and then later Henry’s two sons, Dick and Ken, went away to war. Dick went into the Southern army, and Ken fought for the North.” She said her owner, Henry Rose, had “laid out in the woods for several days one time when Southern soldiers were looking for him and then returned when he signed a pledge of allegiance.”
She recalled that on many occasions Southern soldiers came to the farm with wagons and carried off all the food they could find to feed the Southern army. “I remember Mrs. Rose and how she attempted to prevent the soldiers from carrying away all we had. The war ended, and Dick and Ken Rose came home, both uninjured. It must have been months afterward that I was told my father was going to send for me. I remember that Mr. Rose said he wouldn’t let me leave, and then Mrs. Rose interrupted, telling me, ‘You’re just as free as we are, and you can go.’”
Adeline said that she did not know she was a slave until the close of the Civil War. When the master’s wife told her that she was free and could return to her father’s home, she was reluctant to go. After gaining her freedom, she lived with her parents for about five years on the Reuben Rose plantation, and then the family moved to nearby Union City. She married a man named Steward, and they had one son, Johnny, who married young and died young. Her husband, Steward, died early in life, too, and Adeline then married George Lennox. After the death of her second husband, Adeline continued to live in the vicinity of Paris and Union City, Tennessee, until 1924, when she moved to Elkhart, Indiana, to live with her daughter-in-law, who had remarried.
At the time of her interview, Adeline’s health had been failing for three years. With her daughter-in-law’s help, she was able to live on a pension of around $13 a month. Called “Granny” by her neighbors, she enjoyed smoking tobacco and eating cornbread and boiled potatoes, but she did not eat sweets and did not like automobiles, which she said “are too bumpy, and they gather too much air.” She said her “one ambition in life is to live so that I may claim Heaven as my home when I die.”
Adeline died on October 6, 1938, according to her obituary in the Elkhart Truth (October 7, 1938), in which her name is spelled “Adline Lenox.”