Preserved for All Time be preserved, and will someday be digitized in their entirety. “The Willis journals must be a one-of-a-kind record. I know of no other like it in the state of Maryland, and probably anywhere. “A reader asked if I changed any of the wording and remarks they made about slaves and black farmhands. And, in truth, I wondered how I would deal with that, but, and this is most curious given the fact the Willises owned slaves and later hired black farm hands, but at no time in any of the 3 million words of their journals did I see any use of the N-word, or any derogatory, or any demeaning reference to black people other than sometimes calling his black help ‘boys.’ And that not done in a mean sense. That is certainly uncool now, but definitely not the worst thing that could have been said. “They interacted with the blacks that worked for them ~ loaned them money sometimes, and when their beloved house slave Cassie was sick, Willis had the doctor see her several times. When she died, Nicholas was nearly as inconsolable as when one of his own children died. She was buried on the farm, a black preacher conducted the funeral and Willis personally made her coffin and stained it with umber. “They often worked alongside
Nicholas Willis their slaves, and later their black help. They weren’t rich enough not to, but the Willises were certainly conscious of social classes, as was common then. Charles, Sr., may have sometimes worked alongside his black help, but you knew his status because he wore a hat, coat and tie! People back then dressed up to do anything, it seems. “In a time when it was legal to beat one’s slaves, children and wife, all being chattel property, an account of beating a disobedient slave with a black gum switch appalls a modern reader. “But let us allow the thing to speak for itself” says Dawson. From the diaries . . . 20