Nancy Watkins: A Woman of Silence and Strength

Chapter 1: Born in Bondage (1822–1845)

But Nancy survived.

She was likely born on a plantation, maybe in a rural part of Georgia where long fields met pine forests, where Black women rose before the sun to tend someone else’s child before their own. As a child, she may have carried water to the field hands, swept porches, picked cotton with bleeding fingers, or held crying babies while her mother labored elsewhere.

Her life was one of quiet strength, shaped by rhythms older than slavery itself. When work ended, the women gathered—braiding each other’s hair, singing low, speaking in codes passed down from Africa to Carolina to Georgia. Nancy may have heard the elders whisper of freedom, of escape, of God’s justice coming like a storm. She may have seen women resist in small, brilliant ways—saving seeds, telling stories, refusing to forget who they were.

By her teens, Nancy had likely become a woman in the eyes of her enslavers. For a young Black girl, that meant more work, more danger, more watching over younger siblings or children not her own. But it also meant deepening ties with other women—building spiritual armor in the invisible spaces of Black life.

At some point—perhaps in her twenties—Nancy met Holland Collins Watkins.

We do not know how they came to be together. We do not know if they were allowed to marry, or if their union had to survive in secret, without the blessing of church or law. But what we do know is that they formed something that endured. A partnership. A family. A home, however humble.

Nancy and Holland would eventually have at least five children: Frank, Henry, Cheney, Harriet, and Margaret. Each one born into a world that changed slowly, painfully, sometimes not at all. But each one a testament to their mother’s endurance.

Nancy’s story, like so many Black women of her era, was not preserved in newspapers or family Bibles. But it lived on—in the way her children carried themselves, in the names passed down, in the survival of a bloodline that refused to disappear.

Chapter 2: A Family Made in Chains (1845–1865)

In the two decades before the Civil War, Nancy Watkins lived two lives at once: one shaped by bondage, the other by love. She was an enslaved woman, denied legal rights, and yet she carved out a space where something extraordinary could take root—a family.

She and Holland Collins Watkins had children in the shadows of a system that refused to recognize them as husband and wife. Their union, like that of so many enslaved couples, had no paperwork, no legal protections, no promise of permanence. At any moment, a bill of sale could tear their lives apart.

And still—they stayed.
And still—they loved.
And still—they raised five children: Frank, Henry, Cheney, Harriet, and Margaret.

Each child was born in bondage. Each child’s birth a private rebellion—a refusal to disappear. Nancy gave them names with care, knowing it might be the only thing the world wouldn’t take from them. And though they were born into slavery, she treated each as a child of God, worthy of dignity, of discipline, and of dreams.

Her days began before the sun. Whether working in the fields or in the house of an enslaver, Nancy's body was never her own. She labored through pregnancies, carried water with swollen ankles, sang lullabies between lashes of a whip meant for others. But she protected her children the best she could—with stories, with silence, with sacrifice.

In the evenings, Nancy and Holland may have gathered their children by lamplight or fire. There, she would brush out their hair, mend their clothes, and teach them things that could not be unlearned: how to bow their heads without breaking, how to speak carefully in front of white folks, how to remember their family even if someone tried to erase it.

There was music, too. And scripture. Maybe Nancy hummed spirituals under her breath while cooking or washing. Maybe Holland recited Psalms from memory. Their home—be it a shared cabin, a dirt-floor shanty, or a loft above a barn—was their church. Their resistance. Their sanctuary.

As the 1850s turned toward war, the world around Nancy began to tremble. Whispers of freedom traveled faster than newspapers. The children grew—Frank and Henry into young men, Cheney into a quiet thinker, Margaret and Harriet into their mother’s careful shadows. Perhaps one of the boys was sold. Perhaps one of the girls was sent to work in another household. The heartbreak was likely—and common.

Still, Nancy remained anchored.

When the Civil War erupted in 1861, Georgia became a battlefield—not always by guns, but by rumor, by fear, by hope that change was coming. Union troops marched closer. Enslaved people ran when they could. Others, like Nancy, waited—watching, praying, enduring.

And when Emancipation came in 1865, it didn’t arrive on horseback with banners. It came in whispers, in confusion, in uncertainty. It came too late for the years she had already given. Too late for the children born in bondage. But it came. And Nancy—tired, wise, unbroken—stepped into freedom not as a beginning, but as a continuation.

She had already built something no law could undo:
A family. A name. A legacy.

Chapter 3: Rebuilding in the Shadows (1865–1880)

In 1865, the war ended, but Nancy Watkins’ labor did not.

Freedom came like a rumor—slow, cautious, incomplete. No land was handed to her. No wages were back-paid. No apology was issued for the decades she had spent enslaved. But Nancy didn’t wait for restoration. She went to work.

She and Holland were now legally free, but they lived under new names for old systems: tenant farmer, freedman laborer, Black woman in the South. The laws had changed, but the eyes watching her had not. In some counties, the risk of violence only grew after emancipation, as white landowners burned with resentment over what they had lost.

Nancy had no illusions.

Freedom, for her, meant little more than the right to keep her children in the same house at night. To choose her church. To walk the roads without being hunted. These were not small things. For a woman who had raised babies under the threat of sale or assault, even the smallest sliver of autonomy felt sacred.

She and Holland likely took up work on land that wasn’t theirs—perhaps as sharecroppers, maybe as domestic or field laborers for the very people who had once enslaved them. It was a cruel irony, but it was the reality for hundreds of thousands of newly freed families. They worked under contracts they could barely read, for wages they often never saw.

But Nancy did what she had always done—provided, protected, and preserved.

She kept the family together. Frank and Henry were likely grown now, possibly working on nearby farms or trying to secure land of their own. Harriet and Margaret, if still living at home, likely helped Nancy cook, clean, and carry water. Cheney, known in later records as a calm, steady presence, may have inherited his mother’s endurance—the way she could bend without breaking.

And now, for the first time, Nancy could worship where she chose. In a Black church, built by freedmen with rough lumber and deep faith, she found both community and voice. She wore her best dress on Sundays. She sat on the third pew from the front. She sang softly, always off-key but always with feeling. And she listened—not just for scripture, but for the hope it held.

She likely tended a garden, grew sweet potatoes and collard greens, bartered eggs for soap. She stitched quilts from old clothing, saved buttons, reused every scrap. Her hands stayed busy even when her body grew tired. She raised grandchildren the same way she had raised her own—with rules, with rhythm, and with an unshakable spine.

If her name was ever recorded in an official register, it would have been done by a white clerk who didn’t ask how it was spelled. If she spoke in public, it was in measured tones, shaped by survival. But in her home, Nancy Watkins was the law, the leader, the memory keeper.

She was never interviewed. She never appeared in a photograph. But her fingerprints are all over the family that came after. Her strength passed down like an heirloom, not in objects, but in habits. In how to sweep a room. In how to sit with sorrow and still wake up the next day to cook breakfast.

By 1880, Nancy would have been around 58 years old. In a time when few Black women lived long lives, she had endured. She had raised free children. And she had seen the world change—not enough, but more than she had ever been allowed to hope for.

Chapter 4: The Final Years – Wisdom Without Witness (1880–Unknown)

After 1880, the written trail of Nancy Watkins fades. There are no census listings with her name beyond that decade. No church records, no death certificate, no grave marker bearing the years of her life. But that does not mean she vanished.

It means she became memory—a living force passed down by breath, by posture, by the way her descendants lit their stoves or held their grief.

In the decades following Reconstruction, Nancy would have stepped into the honored role held by women who had outlived slavery, outlived childbirth, outlived husbands and hardship: she became “Mama Nancy,” or perhaps just “Granny”—a figure both tender and commanding.

She likely lived in the home of one of her daughters or sons, perhaps Harriet or Cheney, helping raise a new generation while her own body began to slow. She would have moved more gently now—her steps measured, her hands worn smooth by a lifetime of use. Her eyesight may have dimmed, but her memory remained sharp. She remembered the names of those who had gone. She could still tell stories of the old plantation days—though she likely chose not to, unless asked in hushed tones, in the safety of dusk.

She knew how to stretch a meal. How to bind a wound. How to sit with sorrow without rushing it. In a time when grief was a constant companion and joy a hard-won prize, Nancy knew how to hold both.

She likely taught her granddaughters to fold linens properly, boil herbs for colds, and never let anyone make them feel small. She taught her grandsons to pray before meals, remove their hats indoors, and carry the family name with pride—even when the world didn’t see its worth.

In communities like hers, the oldest women were the ones who carried the rituals, guarded the recipes, and told the truth when others stayed quiet. Nancy was not loud, but she was the kind of woman who didn’t need to be. Her presence alone could silence a room. Her stories were gospel. Her silence was scripture.

We do not know when she died. Perhaps it was the late 1880s. Perhaps the 1890s. She may have passed in her sleep, in a quiet room warmed by the fire, the sound of grandchildren whispering in the next room. Or she may have lingered through illness, cared for by hands she once cradled.

No newspaper ran her obituary. But those who knew her remembered.

She was born in chains.
She died in freedom.
And in between, she built a life that endured, despite the odds, despite the erasure.

Her body rests somewhere in Georgia soil—perhaps beneath an unmarked stone, perhaps beneath trees that still remember her name. But her true resting place is in the generations that followed, in the great-great-grandchildren who never knew her voice but carry her resilience in their bones.