"My Grandpa was a slave." Elizabeth Cogdell Sessoms sits in her bright Kinston sunroom surrounded by shelves of memorabilia reflecting a rich, full life. Outside, the sun streams through the branches of a well-formed shade tree, laden with hanging baskets of colorful blooms.

Her words hang for a moment in the air, like an unexpected frost in the June sunshine. The statement, so simple in context, evokes vast complexity, and a curious, fearful need to hear more.

Before she goes on, Ms. Sessoms walks to a shelf to bring back a wooden figure with painted blue overalls and stands it before her on the table. Sadly, she explains all her photos of her grandpa were destroyed by a long ago fire, but this statue reminds her of him. As she begins to tell his story, which becomes her story; the image of a very real character emerges, as if the words themselves can conjure him back into existence:

"Grandpa Cogdell was six years old at the time of Emancipation. He remembered very clearly the day they told him he was free. But he also remembered working as a slave. Because he was so young, he was a water boy, the one who carried the heavy buckets of water to the slaves in the fields….Here - I've written a poem about it…."

From a sheaf of papers, she pulls a print-out of one selection, titled "Grandpa Said" from "Growing Up in Kinston." The heading indicates the piece is a dialect narrative of his recollections as he told them to his grandchildren. In poetry, the impact of a small slave child's experiences is made more powerful by his young listeners' innocent responses to his tales.

As he tells of lugging the full water buckets to the fields, one can relive the tiny boy struggling to keep the precious water from spilling as it bounced against the tired, six year old's legs. Inevitably, some water would splash out, and when that happened, a whipping would result.

At this point, Sessoms wrote, … "We'd wince and say, did you cry, Grandpa? Where was your Mother?"….. His simple answer that Mama was in the kitchen, gives rise to another vision, that of a child's mother, also a slave, helpless to protect her baby from harm's way at the hands of the "massa."

Cogdell's childhood memories included describing the slaves as they leaned briefly on their hoes to dip the hollowed out gourd in the water he'd brought them. Gulping hastily, they'd dip the gourd three or four times in the bucket, then pass it on to the next, with only time for a furtive swipe of the brow to dry their sweat lest they be seen shirking the cotton crop toil.

In winter, other tasks awaited the slaves, for the farm tools needed repair to ready them for the next spring when the relentless cycle began again. These tasks Cogdell called "sit-down work," affording rest for weary legs and backs, but taxing still for "heads an' hands."

At winter's end, he noted the "stand up work" renewed in earnest, so slaves vied to impress "massa" with their off-season skills in hopes of a bit of mercy when summer's heat returned to the slave fields.

In the spirit of all children, Sessom's grandfather could still find happy memories amidst the bad to relate to his grandchildren, like being able to see his family in the evenings, to sing songs and share the extra food his mama was allowed to bring them to eat once the white folks had their fill.

In spite of, or perhaps because of, the grim conditions that imposed constant dysfunction on his early family life, Cogdell never took family unity for granted, and treasured each moment they spent together, even as a grown man.

Often admonishing his grandchildren with his endless pearls of wisdom, like "You's free!…Go to School!…Be Smart!…Be Proud!..., he instilled in them a feeling of self-worth, not an easy task in the time of deep segregation still gripping the South during the thirties. Elizabeth relates, "He was the patriarch of our family in every sense of the word!"

She recalls growing up in Kinston during the depression years, and can chronicle a childhood where the African-American community by necessity formed its own self-contained, insular unit.

Denied even the simplest privileges like going to the library, she and her brothers and sisters would get needed books for school reports when her father, a barber, wrote down the titles on slips of paper. Some of his white customers then entered the whites-only library and checked them out for him.

Although receiving some criticism for his position in a white clientele barber shop, her father was able to parlay his influence into gaining improvements for his neighbors' benefit. Sessoms remembers him posing the question, if they weren't allowed admission to the "public" library: "Why can't we have a library for blacks? After all, we pay taxes, too!"

Given the standard response that there were no qualified black librarians, Mr. Cogdell refused to give up the fight.

Instead, he guided one of Elizabeth's classmates, Laura Hardy, into library studies. Thus, Hardy become Kinston's first black librarian, and what Sessom's knew as "our library," was born.

By the time the depression hit, Grandpa Cogdell operated his own farm along with his wife, Elizabeth's grandmother. There they grew and sold fresh vegetables, and helped feed their family and neighborhood when food was scarce.

In addition, Sessoms recounts how her father often accepted barter in trade for his barber service when people had no money to pay cash.

"Butter, goat's milk, potatoes, eggs, even chickens - anything people could grow or make themselves. Daddy let them pay with what they had." Much of what he received in barter, he then shared with neighbors in need. In those days, that included most everyone.

"You should have seen our back yard! We had a regular zoo out there. A cow, horses, rabbits, even pheasants. I remember Grandpa came over once with a big wagon wheel and set it up on its side to spin like a merry-go-round. What fun we had! Other kids would come over and pay for a ride with a clothespin or even a penny. A penny in those days seemed like a lot to us."

"One rule, though, Daddy made very clear. There were some stores you could go in to buy food, but the lunch counter was whites-only, so you had to walk in, pay for your food, and walk out, but you weren't allowed to sit down to eat there. All my desire was to work at Marston's Drug Store. But Daddy's rule was

`No sittin', No buyin'! So that was the end of that."

Besides his family, Grandpa Cogdell had one great passion - planting trees: "I can still see him loading up the wagon with the trees in big burlap sacks, and taking off around town to plant them. He'd say, `So & so wants another tree for their yard,' and off he'd go."

Although many of his plantings were for customers, many more were just for the love of planting them. "He planted them everywhere, up and down Queen Street, vacant lots, the churchyard, or the schoolyard. It didn't matter. He always talked about how important it was to have shade trees."

Perhaps he just enjoyed seeing the little children playing, or the picnics under the trees. Or perhaps he still remembered the long hot days when a little six year old had to groan under a heavy bucket to carry water to those who couldn't escape the brutal sun.

Looking back on her own childhood, Elizabeth smiles. "I've had a wonderful life. I have been blessed with a wonderful family, a wonderful husband, a beautiful home. But I know, if I don't tell people how Grandpa struggled, how life used to be, how will they ever know? I want to tell them how it felt as a little girl, pushed to the back of a bus, looking up at all the unfriendly faces I didn't know. How I memorized the poem about the friendly policeman, but how in reality we little black kids ran away in fear when we saw a policeman because he was not our friend. People should know these things."

It is to this end that Sessoms and others organized the East Kinston Heritage Group at Lenoir Community College in the mid-nineties. Its mission is to preserve the history they lived, covering the fifty years from 1900 to 1950.

Realizing the need to commit their memories to writing, they are now culminating a project to publish a book which documents this vital part of Kinston's history.

Fulfilling her Grandpa's dream for her to reach her potential, Elizabeth Cogdell Sessoms went on to earn her Masters and teach school. She also is an accomplished poet and writer, who reports for the "East Carolina News." Her only regret is that she no longer has any photos of her grandpa to cherish.

Although she may not have a photograph to point to, she may have something more precious - the knowledge that her stories of his life will keep his heritage alive forever.