Julia Cole

Julia Cole (1861-1945) formerly enslaved person who narrated her life in an interview with the U.S. government’s Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930 when she was 78 years old and living in Athens, Georgia. Julia is described by the interviewer as a neat, “yellowish” woman with a “dumpy” figure. At the time of the interview, Julia’s daughter, Rosa Woodall, was a domestic worker who cooked for a local dentist’s family. Julia, reportedly eager to share all that she could, told the interviewers that she was born Julia Johnson in Monroe, Georgia, to her mother Mittie Johnson; she does not remember her father. One of her grandfather’s was named Abram. Census records state that both of Julia’s parents were born in Georgia. Though she does not mention a year of birth in her interview, a woman named Julia Johnson living in Athens appears in the 1880 federal census aged 20. Other records found on Ancestry.com report her birth year as 1852, 1857, 1860, and 1861. The latter year is listed on her gravestone.

Like her mother, Mittie Johnson, Julia, her younger sister Hattie Johnson, and her elder brothers Richard and Thomas Grant were all owned by John Grant. Julia identifies her former owner’s family, the Grants, as rich people with “a heap of slaves.” She further highlighted the Grants’ wealth by revealing that they gifted the city of Atlanta 100 acres of former Cherokee land in 1883, thus developing what is now Atlanta’s oldest city park. 

Julia describes life on the Grant plantation as pleasant and untroubled, though she was a young child, aged between 5 and 13, at the end of the war and the passage of the 15th amendment abolishing slavery. Critics of the Federal Slave Narrative project have suggested that some respondents depicted their experiences under slavery as benign, particularly when interviewed by white people as was the case in Julia Cole’s interview. She fondly remembers the Grants as “good white folks” who had no jails on their land and never had to call on slave patrollers because they reportedly treated their human property so well that no enslaved person had the urge to run North. This is not to say, however, that there were no punitive measures in place. Instead, Julia reports, whether from direct experience or family lore is uncertain, that John Grant looked to a Black man named Uncle Jim Cooper to issue corporal punishments like whippings. Further describing paternalistic owners, Julia recalled the quality of her clothing, food, and everyday life. She remembered wearing well-made homespun clothes, dresses with belts, and brass-toed shoes. She also recounted eating dinners of meat, vegetables, and cornbread and being treated with herbs like Jerusalem oak seed when she or other enslaved persons were unwell. She reports that her “Missus” taught the enslaved children to spell and made them run as punishment for not remembering their vocabulary words. 

The U.S. Civil War apparently brought disruption to the pleasant portrait that Julia paints of life on the Grant plantation. Some time during the war, Julia reports that “Lincoln’s general”—possibly William Tecumseh Sherman on his march through Georgia—showed up to their plantation on a grand red horse. Union soldiers came looking for her owner John, who had hidden himself in the loft of the meat house and demanded that no one tell soldiers of his whereabouts. With John hiding out, soldiers instead took his son Willie—which Julia reports devastated his parents. Union soldiers also helped themselves to the supplies of the smokehouses and stores on the plantation. While the Grants experienced the loss of their son during the Civil War, Julia would experience her own loss as the war neared its end. She informs interviewers that her mother died of measles near the end of the war and the Grants obliged all of Mittie’s last wishes for her funerary arrangements. 

After the war ended, Julia’s family was split apart and she began her own life anew in Athens, Georgia. Julia’s former owner John Grant moved his family to Atlanta. Although the Grants no longer had possession of their former slaves, they continued to exert an influence. Julia’s sister Hattie also moved with the Grants to the growing city. Separated from her sister, Julia took a covered wagon to Athens with her uncle Jordan Johnson. She would also be separated from her brother Thomas, who she reports became captain of a “colored troop” and served in the Philippines. Julia is likely referring to the all-Black unit of soldiers known as “Buffalo Soldiers” by Indigenous American tribes, which was organized in 1866 as an extension of the all-Black 10th Calvary Regiment of the U.S. Army and was eventually deployed to the Philippines during that island’s war for Independence in 1898-99. Julia shares that she was eventually hired out to the Marks family and would marry twice. Her first marriage was to a man named Crit Clayton and her second was to Andrew Cole. Records in Ancestry.com show that Julia and Andrew married in December 1890. Julia remembers fondly the beautiful flowery wedding dress she wore in her marriage to her first husband. She identifies Andrew as the father of her seven children, out of whom only four were alive at the time of her interview. Andrew died prior to the 1910 Census, which lists Julia as head of her household and working as a cook in a family home. A 1926 city directory for Athens states that Julia was working as a laundress at that time. Records show that one son, Will Cole, born in 1897, joined the Great Migration north during the 1920s and died in Detroit, Michigan, in 1930. In 1945, about eight years after the FWP interview, Julia died at 84 years old of unreported causes. She is buried in Athens, Clarke County, Georgia at the Brooklyn Cemetery. At the present time, there are no records of surviving descendants.