'My grandmother was a slave cook': 99-year-old Tennessee matriarch shares memories of not-so-distant past

MEMPHIS, Tenn. – Ora Jackson, age 99 and white-haired, is watching TV in the living room in the house she shares with her daughter. When visitors arrive, someone switches off the TV set, and minutes later, she tells a story.

"My grandmother was a slave cook. And she had five boys. So she would throw food out on the ground for her boys to eat from the house that she was working from. They weren't allowed to go in the house, so whatever they had left, she'd throw it out, just like you fed chickens at that time."

"So my father was the oldest and he said, 'I'll never live to let my children live like that.'"

Whether or not her father was actually born into slavery or soon after it ended is unclear. Yet as the nation prepares for this Saturday's celebration of Juneteenth to mark the end of slavery in the United States, stories like Ora Jackson's are a reminder that our nation's slavery history is not so long ago.

"I think it shows how young a society we really are," said G. Wayne Dowdy, archivist and historian with the Memphis Public Library. "And also that the Civil War and slavery is most closer to us than we like to think."

Farm life

Ora Jackson grew up on a farm near Indianola, Mississippi, the town known as the home of blues music superstar B.B. King. She says she knew him growing up. And her father's name was Virge Cooley. 

She says her father never had a chance at formal education, but picked up useful skills including blacksmithing, carpentry and many farming techniques. 

"He raised his own cows. Hogs. Chicken. We had all our eggs. We had plenty to eat. Plenty of everything to eat. He raised his sweet potatoes and he would take his potatoes and bunk 'em over the winter so they wouldn't freeze. He was just a man that knows how to raise a family."

Ora Jackson believes her father was born into slavery. "Yes," she said. "Because my grandmother was a slave cook." 

She said her father told her about slavery. "He told us the life he lived, that they had a little shed in the back for him. His mother and brother at the back of the house, the back of the folks' house."

When Ora Jackson was a little girl, she met her formerly enslaved grandmother, and her grandmother died in the family home, said Ora Jackson's oldest daughter, Elsie Bailey.

Few people alive today are children of formerly enslaved people — but some documented cases exist. For instance, last year The Washington Post told the story of Daniel Smith, then 88, whose formerly enslaved father had married a much younger woman and shared with his son stories of whippings and other abuses during slavery days. 

Virge Cooley was probably at least in his late 40s when Ora Jackson was born in 1921. But his exact age is a mystery.

When he died in 1970, family members said he was about 106 years old, meaning he would have been born sometime around 1864 or 1865, the year that the Civil War ended slavery in the United States. 

No birth certificate has surfaced and it is unlikely that the document exists. However, one of Ora Jackson's grandchildren, Taurus Bailey, has done genealogical research.

He found Census records that point to a different birth date for Virge Cooley: around 1872, several years after the end of slavery, but still during a time in which many Black people lived under extremely harsh conditions. 

Virge Cooley managed to escape those circumstances, run a farm and launch a big family. He was married more than once and fathered 21 children in all. Ora Jackson is the youngest, and the only one who survives today, her oldest daughter said.

Her mother's name was Frances Cooley.  "Oh she was a fine lady — could cook anything!" Ora Jackson said. "And she never used a recipe in her life. But she always told us to treat people like we wanted to be treated."

Her mother didn't have the chance to go to school. "But she could write like nobody else could. And she remembered songs that nobody else would sing. She was just a self-educated woman."

Jackson said her family managed to avoid the lynchings and other racist violence that sometimes impacted Black people in Mississippi during this time, largely because her father usually kept the family members at home.

Importantly, her father wasn't a sharecropper making a poor living on someone else's land. He owned the property. 

His own father, a white man, had given him $800, Jackson said. "He took that money and bought his land to put all his children in one place."

Marriage and a move to Memphis

Ora Jackson met her first husband, Robert Lewis when he was working in a cotton field. "He was plowing. With a mule now, not a tractor." She was married at age 21, in the early 1940s and moved to Memphis. Her first daughter was born soon thereafter.

At one point she lived near Booker T. Washington High, and the school band would come out and practice, drums pounding. Her little daughter enjoyed it.

"She would be on there just dancing you know, with the music from the band. And she said 'Mother, I'm going to that school, when I get bigger, I'm going to that school.'"

"And she become the principal of the school." 

That daughter, Elsie Bailey, now 79, not only served as principal of Booker T. Washington High School, she retired as a high-level official in the local school system. 

That story reflects Ora Jackson's willingness to push her children toward education. 

"Because I had gone through so much myself," she said. "And in Indianola, you didn't even have the things that was even necessary for students there." 

Her daughter says Ora Jackson was the first Black woman to work as a matron, or guard, in the women's prison at the Penal Farm, and was also the first Black woman to work as a courtroom bailiff.

The Shelby County government couldn't immediately confirm that she was the first to hold these positions. What is indisputable is that she made an impression in the job. A family photo shows her promotion to sergeant.

Later, family members would sometimes go back to visit their grandfather, Virge Cooley, who still lived in Mississippi. 

One of Ora Jackson's sons, Larry Lewis, now 65, remembers walking with his grandfather to a store when he was about eight or nine and hearing him use language reminiscent of the slavery period.

"He referred to the store owner as 'master.' And he said, 'You got to watch master, because he'll cheat you. You've gonna have to learn how to count your money.' Interestingly enough later on, I got a degree in mathematics, but at that particular time, it was kind of ironic that he did not have a formal education. But he knew how to count his money." 

The grandson's research

Some time ago Taurus Bailey, a lawyer, began researching his family history, using records available through Ancestry.com. 

A breakthrough came when he posted a photo of his grandmother on the website. A distant relative named Marilyn Mays living in Grenada, Mississippi wrote to him, saying his grandmother looked just like her grandmother. 

In an interview, Mays explained that a member of the white slaveholding Caffey family, James Caffey had fathered a child with a Black woman. That child was her uncle Rufus. She said James Caffey had acknowledged Rufus as his own son. 

Taurus Bailey spoke with Mays and reviewed the available records, and concluded that another white member of the Caffey family, Hooper Caffey, was the father of Virge Cooley — and his own ancestor. The family had owned many slaves and had lived in various places in the South, including Grenada, Mississippi. 

He said he has mixed feelings about the discovery of the relationship between the wealthy slaveowner and Fannie Murphy, the Black cook.

"It was more likely than not a rape and not a consensual relationship. But because of the wealth he amassed, his records allowed me to find other relatives . . . Plus, I know that he helped take care of my great-grandfather, which he didn't have to do," he said, referring to the transfer of money.

So where did the name "Cooley" come from? Bailey concludes that Fannie Murphy gave that name to her mixed-race son to hide the connection to the Caffey family.

Taurus Bailey has also exchanged emails with distant white relatives who saw his profile picture on the genealogy site.

"Obviously they were a little bewildered, as to who the African-American guy is that's related to them through Hooper Caffey. Those were older people, so I explained it to them, and I never had any problems with anybody denying it or anything."

Dowdy, the historian, has written a forthcoming book on slavery in the Mid-South called "Enslavement in Memphis" and says sexual relationships between slave owners and enslaved women were not unusual. "It's far more common than we think."

"The real question is how much of that was consensual and how much of it was not. The assumption is — it's probably a correct assumption — that most of it was not. But there are examples of love across the line, so we don't know."

He also said the story of people discovering relatives of another race is likewise quite common. 

"If you can trace your family back to before the Civil War, to the slavery period, white or Black, you're probably going to find ancestors of both colors."

The history helps explain a curious incident from Virge Cooley's funeral in 1970. Elsie Bailey recalls a mysterious white man who sat in the front row. People said he was "Papa's brother" — presumably a half-brother from another mother.

Celebrating 100 years

After her children were grown, Ora Lewis divorced her first husband. She later married John D. Jackson and took his last name.

She retired from the Sheriff's department in 1976, her daughter said. In retirement, she enjoyed travel and visits to NAACP conventions.

Today, Ora Jackson enjoys watching TV, especially game shows including "The Price is Right." She also enjoys worshipping at the church where her son Larry Lewis is a pastor.

Many of her family members will gather again in July, when she celebrates 100 years. She gave birth to eight children, six of whom are still alive. 

"Oh, I have the one most wonderful children in the world," Jackson said. "Don't start me to talk about my children!" she said. "They respectable, they are Christian. They are educated. All of them have more than one degree. So I feel so blessed if I have done nothing else."

She also has 20 grandchildren, 34 great-grandchildren and three great-great grandchildren. 

Taurus Bailey says the family owes a debt of gratitude to Ora Jackson and the generations before her. "I am astonished that a guy like Virge Cooley made it through the deep South as a mulatto man, a bastard son," he said. Yet he managed through hard work and a little financial help to put together a farm and raise a huge number of children, all with their own remarkable stories, he said.

"The most astonishing thing, the most grateful thing is that we all are in extraordinarily fortunate educational and socioeconomic positions." For a Black family in the South, it's remarkable, he said. "We're lucky."  

So does Ora Jackson have any advice for people who want to live to be 100?

"Treat other people like you want to be treated," she said. "That's enough."

And how should people remember slavery? "I think every person who knows about it should (remember.) Just don't forget from whence they've come." 

Follow Daniel Connolly on Twitter: @danielconnolly.