Adah Isabelle McClain Suggs was born in slavery before January 22, 1852. Her owners were Colonel Jackson McClain and his wife, Louisa. Adah was raised and cared for by her mother in the slave quarters of the McClain plantation, a large estate in Henderson County, Kentucky, three and a half miles from the city of Henderson. She claimed that the McClains were good to their slaves and never beat them. Among her many childhood memories of the slave quarters, she recalled the slaves singing and dancing together after a day’s hard work. She said their voices were strong, and their songs were sweet.
When Adah was not yet five years old, Louisa McClain visited the slave quarters to review the living conditions of the blacks. There she discovered that Adah had been taught by her mother to knit stockings, using wheat straws for knitting needles. Mrs. McClain at once took her from her mother’s care and gave her a room in the McClains’ house. Adah soon was borrowing books from the McClains’ library and recalled receiving “words of praise and encouragement” for her efforts. Although Adah was happy in the big house, her mother knew that unhappiness was in store for her daughter if she remained on the plantation. Adah said it was a custom throughout the southern states that the firstborn of each female slave should be the child of her master, and young girls were forced into maternity at puberty. Slave mothers naturally resisted this appalling practice, and Adah’s mother was determined to prevent her child from being victimized. According to the fieldworker, Adah’s “escape from slavery planned and executed by her anxious mother, Harriott McClain, bears the earmarks of fiction, but the truth of all related occurrences has been established.”
The first attempted escape was thwarted. When Adah was about twelve, Harriott tried to take her to a safe place, but they were overtaken on the road to a ferry that they had hoped would put them across the Ohio River. They were carried back to the plantation, and Harriott was punished and locked in an upstairs room. Adah knew her mother was imprisoned there and often climbed up to a window where the two could talk.
One night in a dream her mother received directions for escaping. She told Adah about the dream and instructed her how they might escape together. Adah got a large knife from Louisa McClain’s pantry, and with it Harriott pried the lock from her door. Around midnight she went to a large tobacco barn and waited there for her daughter.
Adah had some trouble escaping, for as a useful member of the McClain household, her services were hourly in demand. The McClains’ daughter, Annie, had been born with a cleft palate and later developed heart dropsy, which regularly required surgery in Louisville. Adah learned to care for Annie and drew the bandages for the surgeon. She vividly recalled one trip to Louisville when the McClain party stopped at the Gault House. Adah said, “It was a grand place,” and described the handsome draperies, winding stairway, and other “artistic objects” she saw at the grand hotel. Adah loved Annie, who always wanted Adah near her, so Harriott McClain waited patiently for her daughter in the tobacco barn.
That night Adah and her mother traveled to Henderson, where they hid under Margaret Bentley’s house until darkness fell. Frightened, they crept through the woods in constant fear of being recaptured. Federal soldiers put them across the Ohio River at Henderson, and from there they cautiously traveled to Evansville. Harriott’s husband, Milton McClain, and her son, Jerome, were volunteers in a black regiment. Federal statute gave freedom to enlisted blacks as well as to their wives and children, so by statute Harriott McClain and her daughter should have been given their freedom anyway.
Arriving in Evansville, Adah and her mother were befriended by free blacks. Harriott obtained a position as a maid with the Parvine family. Adah said that “Miss Hallie and Miss Genevieve Parvine were real good folks.” After working for the Parvines for about two years, Harriott had saved enough money to place her daughter in “pay school,” where she learned rapidly.
On January 18, 1872, Adah married Thomas Suggs, who was deceased at the time of the interview. Though Thomas was held by Archibald Dixon and Bill McClain (see Hettie McClain), Adah and her daughter, Harriott Holloway, believed that he had adopted Suggs as his name because a man named Suggs had once befriended him in a time of trouble. Adah and Thomas had fifteen children—including twin daughters and a set of triplets, two sons and a daughter. Adah claimed she was happy in her belief in God and Christ and hoped for a glorious hereafter.
Ada died on February 20, 1938. Her obituary in the Evansville Press (February 21, 1938) reads, in part, “Mrs. Ada Suggs, 86, of 527 S. Linwood-av, died Sunday. She lived here over 63 years.”