Slave Grandchildren Remember Oral History I_4_HBCUHeritageHome.com_12-22-25

Slave Grandchildren Remember Oral History I_4_HBCUHeritageHome.com_12-22-25

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Born in 1921, Raymond Northern of Williamson County, Tennessee, is child number six of twelve children of Charlotte Berry Northern, a grandson of formerly enslaved “Uncle” Harry Berry, and a great-grandson of former plantation owner Basil Berry.

In video series 1 of 2 he discusses how his grandfather talked sparingly of his formerly enslaved mother and mostly of his white owner father, whose photograph he made sure to share with his descendants. The grandfather learned to read and write in enslavement, focusing on the Bible and helping other people, especially white people, read newspapers.

As a free man, the grandfather worked a rented farm near his boyhood home and Raymond would join him sometimes when he took his wares to sell at night at a farmers market in Nashville, about eight or nine miles away. He added that his grandmother and many other black people are buried on white people’s farms in the area, and his grandfather orchestrated the purchase of a black cemetery operated by a benevolent lodge, with more care than the farm burial ground, on the property to which the church was moved in 1932. His sharecropper parents, Charlotte and Thomas Eugene Northern, are among the people buried in the newer lodge-operated cemetery.

The oral history includes details of Mr. Northern’s life, such as school was too far to attend after eighth grade, he worked as a concrete truck driver for thirty-three years, was a builder for his brother’s Consolidated Construction Company, served in World War II, worked as a concrete finisher, and for years intermittently served as an all-around seven-hundred-acre farm hand and Belle Meade house servant for Mrs. Paul Davis. Her husband was the longtime president of First American National Bank in Nashville. “She was everything,” he said of Mrs. Davis. “She was nice; she paid two dollars (a day) then….She was really good with us….Those oldtimers would get in the hospital and she would pay their bill….But the old man, he was tight.”