Journey's End: The Memories and Traditions of Daisy Turner and Her Family; Part 1

Daisy Turner was one of Vermont's most remarkable storytellers. She died in February 1988 at the age of 104. Fortunately, many Turner stories have been recorded and they bring to life a time in American history that most of us have only read about all of these young people. Now, they can't imagine that 100 years ago they had these Negro slave down here in the United States. They don't know nothing about it. And they I tell some of these things that they look at me that they think the world must be a little lonely. Well, I know they went there. They were beating them and working them. They were slaves for sale in the United States, in Washington, D.C.. I remember Aunt Daisy as being a very articulate person. She was never at a loss for words. She had a memory similar to a computer. She could reach back and, quote, dates, names, places, occasions over

and over again that still be the same. And Daisy was especially proud of her father and she idolized him. He taught her about mending fences and chopping wood, tending to the livestock, and she just loved being with him all the time. Her father told her all the things that happened to him when he was on the plantation, when the master could say that the different colored slaves and then could sing or do something. And they had they made the whole thing would be to bend it back and play it like a guitar. They didn't have the money and think to buy nothing. But when the master could see that they could some of the other smart Skardu like that, then the master would buy them something, you know, nothing to help them to get a banjo or a guitar. And then they'd sing for the master and things.

When they had parted you at what? Make this dark we. Why? Like the others, I am not gay. Why make the tear roll down his cheeks from early morning till the day my story darkeys you feel here for in my memory freshet dwell, it will call each one to shed a tear or the grave of my sweet kitty. You will see, we didn't just come from nothing and nowhere. We've got a background and the background be traced right down to the root. And that is if Daisy Turner, who died in 1988 at the age of one oh four tomorrow

on Journey's End, African slave ships and a Cherokee princess. I'm Barbara Jordan. The Turner family traces its origin by word of mouth back to Africa early in the last century, says Daisy Turner, a ship came by somewhere just off the coast of Ghana. The ship was carrying a woman who was to become Daisy's great grandmother, this English bride and groom, while on their honeymoon to Africa on the ship of the bride's father. When this terrible storm came up and the ship went to pieces on the coast of Africa. It was a terrible disaster. And this happened right in the early eighteen hundreds.

I can remember my Aunt Daisy relating a story where an English ship was wrecked off the west coast of Africa and one of the people rescued was a bride who was on board. She later became the wife of the chieftain son who rescued her and a boy who was born to them named Alexander. He grew up there with them and with her, and he got to be very clever and smart and learned English from her. In fact, he was too smart because he got interested in the slave ship that seemed to have come to that section about every three months. He was between 18 and 22 when he was getting different slaves to gather there for the slave

ship that he was selling and making deals with the United States slave ship. And they took him on the slave ship as a slave with them. It seemed to have been one of the worst trips that the slave owners had made. And they slave died and women had children on the ship and in the whole different diseases cropped out and they had to all so many died that they had to bury them at sea until the captain didn't know what to do. After many hardships, the slave vessel landed in New Orleans. There, Alexander was bought by a Virginia plantation owner, but Alexander was different from the other slaves. He spoke English and, says Daisy Turner, he was hard to control for this reason. Alexander did not end up in the fields with the other slaves.

They said that he was so arrogant and hard to handle that the overseer couldn't get on the head of overseer, and the master decided to put him in a different line of work. And he became a fighter for the master. And he went around doing fight fierce fighting and chicken fighting. And and so he did this fighting for the trophies and money for the master and those who used to tell of my grandfather's father fighting for his owner all over the south. Prizefighting this was. And on one occasion, he met an Indian lady named Princess Silver Bells. My grandfather was there fighting when he

met this Cherokee Indian girl. He fell in love at once, the prince of Silver Bell, and she saw him. Well, then you'll see the master all golden like their father. And so he'd done anything that he could to help him and to please him and make him happy. So he allowed of Silver Bell to go back to the plantation. And then they were given a cabin right near the big house, the White House. She wasn't put down with the other and the white Mrs. to her right away. And then she admired her beaded dress and luggage. And then they and so when she found that she could sell and mend and do everything, then they knew how valuable she would be because she could make those red coats for the white men to wherever they were horseback riding and all.

And she used to sew and men did everything for them. Princess Silver Bells was also called Roosevelt or Rose. In 1845, Rose and Alexander had a son, Alec, who became Daisy Turner's father. Tomorrow on Journey's End, the story of young Alec and his red moccasins. I'm Barbara Jordan. He didn't know nothing else to talk about my father, except in Virginia, the plantation, and what he knew about slavery and his fathers and mothers talk down that down there was Virginia where he turned his father was born a slave, used to tell stories about his father days, his grandfather, who traveled for the master all around the south as a boxer when he accidentally killed his opponent in the ring. He vowed to fight no more.

Soon after, probably in eighteen forty nine days, his grandfather was killed, crushed by a falling barn after his grandmother continued to work on the plantation as a seamstress, making fine clothes for the master's family. As Daisy Turner recalls, it was because of these clothes that five year old, like her father, gradually began to realize he was different from his white playmates, the little boys, John and Frank, and died in the death of one always dressed different than he. And he couldn't understand why. He always wore barefooted. He never had any shoes, our little stockings with rings running around them, our little shop pants on, or a little white blouses and colored blouses that had little ruffles at the neck and ruffled around the sleeve.

And all he will was just this one little piece belted in and sometimes little pants underneath them and no shoes ever or anything. And he was just their size and all. And they played together. And he began asking his mother why he didn't look like them and all. But he said she was constantly sewing and she never seemed to be able to make him happy. I explain why he didn't look like the boys he played with. And so he said after a while she made him some level moccasins from little pieces of scrap. After she'd made the red coats and thing, she made these little magazines for him and put out a little beads them to tell it all and all how he loved to put them on and strut around. But he noticed after awhile that every time the missus came down to the cabin or anyone was around, she would always

take them off his feet and hide them so that he couldn't have them on to show them off. And he wondered why she did that. And finally, when that little white girl was having this party and the mother and she kept coming back and forth trying on the dress, that the ruffles and things one morning he had on these level. And when she came down, the white lady, so that the lady, white lady discovered these red shoes on his feet. And what did she do but grab those little Mogensen from his feet and throw them in the fire. And he said, what did she do that for? But that's what she did. And so he just made a rush for her and grabbed her and told her dresses and skirts and ruffled all.

And finally she fell to the floor and he bit her legs and a bit of a hand that I felt with a tablet. And he says she fainted dead away. And I called he said he never forgot it as long as he lived. An awful, awful look in his mother's eyes. Daisy Turner and more stories of plantation life on tomorrow's Journey's End. I'm Barbara Jordan. In 1845, days after his father, Alec, was born a slave on a Virginia plantation as a child, Alec was put to work tending sheep, driving the cows to pasture and cleaning stables. His days on the plantation passed with a measure of hard work lightened from time to time by celebrations and homemade entertainment. The Masters found these slaves to be good singers, instrumentalists and dancers.

Daisy Turner remembers her father singing Nellie Gray, one of the songs popular among the slaves. Oh, my poor Nellie Gray. They have taken you away and I'll never see my darling any more. They have taken her to Georgia, but where her life away while I toiled made the cut and the cane and then anything. One night I went to see her. She had gone the never say that a white man came and he bound up in chains while I told them. They all can tell you. Oh my. My father said such a terrible situation was existing that no one could imagine it at all. Like he told about the first little colored girl slave girl she was that he kind of like. But he said some of the white men

started after her and she didn't know what to do, but she ran and jumped in the Rappahannock River and drowned. And he said that that was the year that he was fourteen. And he began to realize more and more that he must get away. And so this freedom I, like Turner's stories, burned these images into his daughter's brain and heart. I'm a hundred and it's just a hundred and twenty years ago that they were putting me up on the block. How much am I how much am I ever. But this woman, this [Unrecognized] woman that this woman I get a hundred years ago, they could put me right up and do that every dark skinned people. And at the same time they would have children by the black women and they got to where they were putting up their own job and selling them like food. Old Daisy Turner. Tomorrow on Journey's End, you hear the fishing story. I'm Barbara Jordan.

Daisy Turner says her father, Alec, was born on the John Golden Plantation on the Rappahannock River in Port Royal, Virginia, since his records show that 77 slaves worked goldens 2000 acres, the northern border of the golden plantation was on the Rappahannock River. And I can remember my grandfather talking about hauling, saying he mentioned a fish called sturgeon and it was full of seafood and because it was Tidewater, probably loaded with crabs and. Other seafood that would be peculiar to that particular area, Bruce Turner lived with his grandfather, Alec, from 1919 to 1923 and heard many stories about plantation life as a youngster.

When my grandfather was 14, 15 years old, he used to haul sang along with other members of the plantation along the Rappahannock River. And while they were doing this, they would sing various songs. I've been listening all night long. John saw the number, which was rhythmic and reminds me of some of the songs that railroad workers would use when they were pounding the tires and then beating on the spikes are put in railroad tracks. My grandfather used to say that if slaves didn't work fast enough, hard enough, early enough to satisfy the overseer, the result would be a beating. One of the ways that the overseers got the attention of the slaves was

to whip them with boards which had holes bored into them, and when applied to the skin, it would crack it after this brain was swabbed on the area and this would sting more and the person would be uncomfortable for a number of days. That was how they kept them under control. My father said when he was 12, they had offered to buy him from the master for twelve thousand dollars. They offered all gold and twelve thousand for my father as a breeder, for that slave down in Virginia and all gold. It wasn't selling. He said he wouldn't sell them at any price so that his father said when they had told all that they had to kind of pacify my father not to sell. It would be much better protected in any way because he was a valuable

Daisy and Bruce Turne, daughter and grandson of Alica Turner. Next on Journey's End, the bloodstained primer. I'm Barbara Jordan. Vermont storyteller Daisy Turner often spoke of a small book that had belonged to her father, Alec Turner. It was a primer, a beginner reader. It was a reminder of his plantation days as a slave that little Plimmer had. Why everybody in town had seen that little bomber. My father bought it from the wall and used to carry it. And I always kept it up on the hill and I used to show it. As I tell you, I used to show these thing to verify the truth. The truth is the Turner family story of apparent slavery. Daisy Turner recalls that one of the jobs her father had to do on the plantation was to take care of the cows.

Father says he had got to be here. He remembered maybe seven going on, eight when he at that time was filling these jars of butter at that time of milk for these different ones, the slaves and the poor white people that came to get the milk to the milk out. And so that is where the little messes had somehow obtained a little primer. I can tell you the name. And I thought I would never forget the name of that Prema from the blood that was on it of my father. And so this little missive, but teaching my father a big seed and Arrieta and things like that. My grandfather's owner's granddaughter was slightly older than my grandfather, and she is the person who behind some building would teach him how to read and write his

alphabet. He did real well at this very apt pupil. It was forbidden by all rules and regulations for slaves to read and write or to have any kind of education. So she did this at the risk of her welfare and his two. She told father that up north in Vermont was a place where he could get up there, the white people would let him be free. But at any rate, all he was doing was filling these bottles when the mother came down behind the milk house because the little daughter somehow was making it obvious that she planned to be down, that this milk and uncertain times to she came and she had this big bullwhip that they used to whip them with. And when she found a little daughter with just Teach-In, father and

father had the Prema. So she undertook to take the pump from father and send a little down to the house with Father Helen and started the fight to keep the little Prema in his own hand. And she struck him with the whip across the face and cut father's face. But he bled on the Prema. According to Daisy Turner, in 1862, at age 16, Alec decided to escape from the plantation and join the army. The first New Jersey cavalry was camped across the Rappahannock River just a few miles from the plantation when the thing finally broke. But father said at that time, no one figured that anything would last only a few months. So when the first shots were fired and the war started, no one, no one is that dream but that it would last and end up in just a few months. Instead of that, it run four long

years. One of the bloodiest wars ever had been found in history with brother fighting brother father, the sounds of family. That wall run by father said the thing went on and on and the fight until he decided and he got together. Other of the slave boys, that was over 100 of them that got together. But finally they said that they all kind of backed down and the number would go down to the edge of the river and the water and make waves and put the sheet on sticks and things that way until the union soldier came over and swam over to them in boats and thing. And father said that's how he first got in touch with the first New Jersey Calvary, Vermont storyteller Daisy Turner. Tomorrow on Journey's End, the raid. I'm Barbara Jordan.

The Masters had all the say and what the market couldn't handle. They had to oversee a white overseer and colored overseers that had charge of the business for them. One of them I told you about this personally, that pop was shot, according to Daisy Turner. Her father joined the union army after he escaped from the Virginia plantation where he had been born. A slave, the cruel overseer of the plantation, was named Presley, which they pronounced posole. I like ran away and met up with the first New Jersey cavalry. But two nights later, he went back the second day after my grandfather ran away from the plantation. He was one of two slaves who acted as guides for a volunteer raiding force to go across the Rappahannock to the golden plantation and capture rebel pickets and the debts.

They were successful in this raid, but on an overseer named Pressley. Was. Leaning out the window and asked, who was that out there, and my grandfather called his own name and saw that the man wouldn't recognize him again, he shot him according to records, he was himself a slave who worked on the plantation for decades. So it's more than likely he was one of the overseers when Alec Turner shot him. Father says they went back. Old Possley was upstairs and he came to the window and wanted to know what they wanted. And he says that Joe is that who is who is there something like that? And father says, this is me, this is Alec.

And he said, I'm going to shoot you. And he said he shot him right through the stomach, like in his chest, and he was partway up on the ladder. The house wasn't too high. It's a two story, I think he said. But anyway, father shot him and he fell and then he felt he had hit the water, get into cold water, cold water. But he died right there and his father said they started testing him or something and he told them to remember something that he had done to him. I don't know what. So he said that was the first shooting that he'd done with that pastor. Personally, I've heard him tell that many and many a time, many and many a time, I can remember my grandfather telling the story over and over again. And when he shot this overseer, it was a sort of retribution for some of

the trials and tribulations that he and others had gone through. Bruce Turner and his Aunt Daisy, tomorrow on Journey's End, the doctor's letter. I'm Barbara Jordan. Daisy Turner loved to recite poetry and knew several long civil war poems. She especially liked one called the doctor's letter because a family nearby was supposed to have received just such a letter telling of the death of their 19 year old son. Dear madam, I am a soldier and my speech is rough and plain. I'm not much used to writing and I hate to give you pain, but I promised I would do it and he thought it might be so. If it came from one that loved him, perhaps it would ease the blow by this time.

You must surely guess the truth I seen would hide. And you'll pardon me for rough soldier words while I tell you how he died the night before the battle and in our crowded tent, more than one brave boy was sobbing and every knee was bent. But we knew not on the morrow when this bloody work was done, how many of us that were kneeling there would see the setting sun. Not so much for self we cared. As for the love that home because it always wished to think of them, to hear cannot do it for them. We left the crowd at ten, your soldier boy and I and we both we three are standing underneath the clear blue sky.

I want more than ten years older, but he seemed to take to me and more often than the younger ones. He saw my company. He seemed to want to talk of home and those that he held dear while I had no taco, but I always like to hear. And so he told me of the night and the time he came away and how you saw it with him, but you didn't beat him stay. And how his own farm hope had been that when this war was through, he might go back with honor to his home, to his friends. And you. He named his sister one by one. And then a day came when he told me of another, but he didn't speak her name. And then he said, Dear doctor, it may be that I shall fall.

And if so, when you write to those at home how I love and spoke of all so I promised, but I didn't think the time would come so soon. The fight was just three days ago. He died today at noon. It seemed so hard that one so loved as he was, should be gone wild. I should still be living here who have no friends at home. It was in the old battle FastLane the shotgun shell. I was standing close beside him and I saw him when he fell. And so I took him in my arms and laid him on. The grass is going against others, but I think they let it pass. It was a mini ball that struck him. It entered at his side, but we didn't think it fatal till this morning. But I wrapped his

cloak around him as we pulled him out tonight and laid him on the clump of trees where the moon was shining bright. I have called the mother both skillfull as I could, and if you wish to find it, I can tell you how it stood. I'll send you back here. Hymnbook. And the cap he used to wear and the lock I cut the night before a big, bright, curly hair. I will send you back his Bible. The night before he died I turned it leaves together and read it by his side. I keep the belt he was wearing. He told me so to do it had a hole up upon beside just where the ball went through. So now I have done his bidding. There is nothing more to tell, but I will always mourn with you. The boy we love so well.

Vermont storyteller Daisy Turner at age 100, reciting the Civil War era poem. The Doctor's Letter. Tomorrow on Journey's End, a marriage end near disaster at sea. I'm Barbara Jordan. During the Civil War, Daisy Turner's father, Alec, worked as a doctor's orderly in the union army after the war ended. The doctor got electorial, a job helping other freed slaves find work. Then my father, Karriem, going back and forth, getting all of these slaves started becoming refugees and going to Washington, they had just like a hump in there for them to stay till something could be done. Then they could get them out. That's what good father was working fast and doing wonderful, finding places

and things for these slave. And another set would come in one day in Washington, Ilic Turner noticed a young girl standing with one of the slave families. Her name was Sally Early. She was the daughter of a slave, Rachel in a Confederate general, Jubal Early Ilic took a particular interest in Selli. Father says he fell in love with my mother at once. When he first saw her. She was only fourteen and she was crying. And so he went over and talked to her and made her feel better. So then they talked together quite a lot. I if you would want to marry me, I would marry you. Don't you see? And then look out for you just as long as we lived so you would never have to be taken away from me. After the wedding, the young bride and groom went to Boston, where they boarded a ship for Maine. They almost didn't survive the voyage when they got out in the ocean

to a certain place between here where they said they were the whirlpool. This particular storm came up and the boat got bad going like and when they got to this particular place, a boat stuck a lake. And father told, Oh, I've heard him tell it so many times. Roy told me that how the water came in, they put in the mattresses and they pump the water. They'd done everything that could be human. They'd be possible until they thought had no hope the boat was going to sink. And father said he prayed about it. He could and took Mama like in his arms. But he said this woman, papa, said she could pass for white and she was kind of shocked and she had blue eyes. But Father said she came out from where they weren't on the deck

and rest up and they on the deck and she raised the hands she raised over by hand. And father said she started praying to Jesus Christ that was born in the manger, the Virgin Mary, and died on the cross of Calvary and who had walked up on the thing. And her name was Lysa. And Father said almost instantly. Now, when that boat stopped rocking readily, easily, and the water stopped coming and the car came and the water stopped coming, the boat and they put her on the boat to play like that. Well, either way, all night. And Papa said that woman played. You don't know for how long, but he said everything. Tom the boat stopped, then all made that call when the maid made the play.

Daisy Turner, daughter of Sally and Alec, up tomorrow on Journey's End, the Slate quarry. I'm Barbara Jordan. Shortly after the Civil War, General Ohala of the Freedmen's Bureau arranged to send a colony of freed slaves near Bangor, Maine, to work in the Meral Slate quarry with them, says Bruce. Tourneau was his grandfather, Alec. My grandfather worked for Merrill in Williamsburg, Maine, in his slate quarry. He had brought a number of former slaves and relatives to Williamsburg to be with him while he was working in the quarry. During the evenings, he would teach these former slaves how to read and write and

figured they earned as much as 50 cents a day. When these workers went down into the quarry, they could be seen wearing a pencil behind their ear, which was an indication that this was a tool that they could also use. In addition to the drills and the hammers which were used in the quarry, Alex daughter Daisy Turner remembers the ballads and hymns sung by her father and friends. One of the things that have bothered me here and then without everything. Hey. Everyone here hey, everyone, Mihail, if you would want them to sing of Jordan Stream, it's a beautiful stream.

It's a very large river you cross, but it takes a valiant soldier to walk the Hemley to the freed. Slaves held prayer meetings where they joined hands and circled around the room singing a dance. All the No. John saw the number. John saw the goal, the number, the holy no sitting in the golding all to come along, Modisane and don't get lost sitting in the golden order. But structural rather didn't come a long cross sitting in the golden altar. Well, John saw the number. No, John saw the number. John saw the holy number sitting in the gold and all day if religion was the thing that money could buy, sitting in the gold and all that the rich would live in, the poor would die sitting in

the gold and all the. But I thank my God that it isn't so sitting in the gold in order for the poor have hope. OK, now you're sitting in the gold and all the. Well, John saw the no, John saw the number. John saw the hole in number sitting in the gold at a john in the Bible. He saw the number that was written on the stones of how they were to get the religion windows at the quarry in Maine harsh the work and social conditions unfamiliar. By 1880, all families of freed slaves had moved away. This moment in the history of Williamsburg, Maine, lived on in the songs remembered by Daisy, turned down by drooping Willow where the violet light blue that light a sweet

Ellem so silent in her tomb she died not broken hearted or sick. Let her be felled by one sad, sad parting from the one she loved so well. One night when the moon was shining and it all had shown before and to her car cottage slightly her jealous lover stole say and love. Come, let us wander down. Next on Journey's End, coming to Vermont, I'm Barbara Jordan.