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Jennie Wilson was born in 1900 to parents who had been slaves. Her father “slipped off” and went to Paducah to join the Union Army. After the war, her parents were given land and became sharecroppers.

As a girl, Wilson worked in the tobacco fields—“suckered and wormed tobacco,” as she puts it—whenever a wounded man could not work. Having learned to cook from her mother, she also cooked in white people’s homes and for large parties. She raised four children, all of whom went to college: two to Howard University in Washington, DC and two to Hampton Institute in Hampton, VA.

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