What a great love story!    Thank you, Paul.

--Joanne

Paul Heinegg <[log in to unmask]> wrote: Joanne, speaking of slave narratives, my wife has an ancestor who is 
included in the slave narratives. Her ancestor told the following story.

"I was never a slave. Although I was born somewhere about 1855, I was not 
born in slavery, but my father was. I'm afraid this story will be more about 
my father and mother than it will be about myself.

My mother was a white woman. Her name was Tempie James. She lived on her 
father's big plantation on the Roanoke River at Rich Square, North Carolina. 
Her father owned acres of land and many slaves. His stables were the best 
anywhere around; they were filled with horses, and the head coachman was 
named Squire James. Squire was a goood looking, well behaved Negro who had a 
white father. He was tall and light colored. Tempie James fell in love with 
this Negro coachman. Nobody knows how long they had been in love before 
Tempie's father found it out, but when he did he locked Tempie in her room. 
For days he and Miss Charlotte, his wife, raved, begged and pleaded, but 
Tempie just said she loved Squire. "Why will you act so?" Miss Charlotte was 
crying. "Haven't we done everything for you and given you everything you 
wanted?"

Tempie shook her head and said: "You haven't given me Squire. He's all I do 
want." Then it was that in the dark of the night Mr. James sent Squire away; 
he sent him to another state and sold him.

But Tempie found it out. She took what money she could find and ran away. 
She went to the owner of Squire and bought him, then she set him free and 
changed his name to Walden: Squire Walden. But then it was against the law 
for a white woman to marry a Negro unless they had a strain of Negro blood, 
so Tempie cut Squire's finger and drained out some blood. She mixed this 
with some whiskey and drank it, then she got on the stand and swore she had 
Negro blood in her, so they were married. She never went back home and her 
people disowned her.
Tempie James Walden, my mother, was a beautiful woman. She was tall and fair 
with long light hair. She had fifteen children, seven boys and eight girls, 
and all of them lived to be old enough to see their great-grandchildren. I 
am the youngest and only one living now. Most of us came back to North 
Carolina. Two of my sisters married and came back to Rich Square to live. 
They lived not far from the James plantation on Roanoke River. Once when we 
were children my sister and I were visiting Rich Square. One day we went to 
pick huckleberries. A woman came riding down the road on a horse. She was a 
tall woman in a long grey riding habit. She had grey hair and grey eyes. She 
stopped and looked at us. "My," she said, "whose pretty little girls are 
you?"
"We're Squire Walden's children," I said. "She looked at me so long and hard 
that I thought she was going to hit me with her whip, but she didn't, she 
hit the horse. He jumped and ran so fast I thought she was going to fall 
off, but she went around the curve and I never saw her again. I never knew 
until later that she was Miss Charlotte James, my grandmother [Narrative 
taken by Travis Jordan, NC Vol. XI, part II, pp.106-8].

The records say as follows:
Squire Walden married Tempie James by 28 March 1832 Halifax County, North 
Carolina bond. Squire was the son of William[3] Walden of adjoining 
Northampton County, North Carolina (where Rich Square is located). William 
(born about 1782) owned 164 acres in Northampton County and was counted in 
Squire Walden's household in the 1850 census. William was the son of 
William[2] Walden of Surry County, Virginia, where he owned 74 acres. 
William[2] was the son of William[1] Walden who was a "Mulatto" presented by 
the Surry County court for profane swearing in 1747. He owned 221 acres and 
slaves in Surry County, and was probably the child of a white woman. The 
family was associated with the Chavis family since many members of the 
family used Chavis as a middle name.

Tempie James was probably the daughter of Benjamin James who was head of a 
Halifax County, North Carolina household of 7 "other free" in 1810 and owned 
141 acres there in 1818. He descended from Andrew James, a slave freed in 
York County, Virginia, in 1678!

Paul 


       
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