Beyond the Yard: Finding Sarah “Sadie” Jefferson: A family history of ancestry, survival, place, and the journey beyond Pleasant Hill
As I read this article more closely, I began to see Sarah’s story differently. One line in
particular stopped me: “Because of her devotion, she never left the yard.” I cannot read
those words without asking what we might be missing.
As a BIPOC woman examining history through my own creative lens, I have to question
the word devotion. In the post-Emancipation South, freedom did not suddenly create
safety for Black people. For a formerly enslaved Black woman, the world beyond those
gates could still be profoundly dangerous.
Perhaps Sarah’s decision to remain at Pleasant Hill was not simply devotion to the
family she served. Perhaps it was devotion to survival. She worked there for 22 years as
a cook, nursemaid, cleaning woman, and seamstress. Her son Peter worked there as a
yard keeper, gardener, stable keeper, driver, and general handyman. She had found
employment, food, shelter, and some measure of security in a world that had never
offered Black people equality simply because slavery had ended.
And then there is the attic. The article tells us that Sarah lived in a small attic room in
the main house. The historian later wrote that the room was an awful place to live,
noting that he had experienced temperatures of 32 degrees in winter and 100 degrees in
summer inside that room. Then comes the sentence: “But to her it was home for 22
years.”
That sentence troubles me. Not because I doubt that Pleasant Hill became familiar to
Sarah. After 22 years, perhaps any place where a person has worked, prayed, raised a
child, endured hardship, and survived can become home in some complicated sense. But
familiarity should never be confused with fairness.
And I do not want the fact that Sarah had once been enslaved to become an explanation
for why she should have been expected to endure conditions that were described, even
by the historian who lived there, as awful. She had already survived enslavement. She
should not have to be imagined as someone who was simply accustomed to deprivation.
There is a difference between saying, “this was home,” and saying, “this was
acceptable.”
I find myself wondering what Sarah felt when she climbed those stairs to that attic room at night. How did she feel when the winter cold seep through the walls? Did the summer heat feel suffocating? Did she lie awake wishing she had other choices? Did she think about the life she had lost before freedom, or the life she hoped her children might have?
We cannot know. But we can ask.
And sometimes asking the right questions is how we begin to restore humanity to people
whose lives were too often recorded through the eyes of those who employed them,
owned them, or studied them.
I also discovered that the newspaper account was incorrect about Sarah’s family. It
stated that she was never married and had one son, Peter. That is not the family history
I have inherited. Sarah was married to Jared Jefferson, a formerly enslaved man, and
they had two sons, David and Peter Jefferson.
Those corrections matter to me because Sarah was not simply a servant at Pleasant Hill.
She was a wife. She was a mother. She was a woman with a life that extended beyond
the boundaries of the yard in which history happened to find her.
The article also tells us that Sarah returned to Tazewell County when she was about 90
years old, expecting that she would soon die. Instead, she lived another 12 years. She
reached the age of 102.
There is something about that that stays with me. A woman who had lived through
slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, racial violence, and the enormous uncertainty of
being a free Black woman in America lived long enough to become an ancestor to people
she would never meet. Including me.
And then there is her face. Sarah’s appearance may surprise people. She does not fit the
image many people have been taught to imagine when they hear the words African
American woman. Her skin is light. Her hair is straight. Looking at her photograph,
someone unfamiliar with the history might never guess that she had African ancestry.
But American racial history was never simply about appearance. It was about ancestry,
power, classification, and the rules imposed upon people’s lives.
The one-drop rule was not a single nationwide law applied uniformly across every era
and every state. But the broader idea that Black ancestry could determine racial
classification became deeply embedded in American society. A person did not have to
possess a particular shade of brown skin, a particular texture of hair, or a particular
appearance to be classified as Black.
Sarah’s photograph makes that history especially striking. She could look white to
someone viewing her portrait today, yet her known Black ancestry placed her within a
racial system that denied her freedom and treated her as property. She did not have to
look Black enough to be enslaved. Her ancestry was enough.
And perhaps that is one of the most important things her photograph has taught me.
American racial history was never merely a story about how people looked. It was a
story about who had the power to decide what a person was—and what rights, freedoms,
and possibilities were allowed to accompany that classification.
When I look at Sarah now, I am not simply looking backward. I am looking across time.
I am looking at a woman who lived within the boundaries of a yard for 22 years, while
my own life has carried me across the United States, Africa, and Europe. I have stood at
the edges of many oceans. I photograph there. I paint there. I write there. I explore what
it means to be a woman of color in the world through my relationship with the vastness
of water. The ocean has become one of the places where I feel most expansive.
And suddenly, my current solo exhibition, Echoes of the Coast: Stories of Place,
Presence, and the Female Gaze, feels infinitely more meaningful.
Sarah’s life was geographically contained. Mine has been defined by movement. She
lived within the boundaries that survival allowed her. I stand at the edge of the ocean
3and look toward the horizon. I cannot help but feel that there is a conversation between
those two women. Her. And me.
But I have learned something important as I have continued to read her story:
Sarah did eave the yard.
When she reached approximately 90 years old, she retired from Pleasant Hill and
returned to Tazewell County, Virginia. The newspaper tells us that she expected to die
there soon. Instead, she lived another 12 years. She did not spend her entire life inside
those boundaries. She left Pleasant Hill, and she entered another chapter of her life.
That realization changes the way I imagine her story. I no longer want to paint Sarah as
a woman who remained forever enclosed by the architecture of Pleasant Hill. She
worked there for 22 years. She survived there. She raised her children within the larger
world beyond it. And when her working life ended, she left.
Now I want to know where she went.
I am planning a pilgrimage to Bristol, Virginia, to stand on the very floorboards where
Sarah once stood. I want to walk into the parlor where her portrait was made. I want to
stand inside the small room where she lived. I want to look outward from that place and
imagine, as respectfully as I can, the woman who occupied it—not to romanticize her
hardship, not to turn deprivation into devotion, and not to pretend that because a place
became familiar, it was necessarily fair.
But my pilgrimage will not end at Pleasant Hill. I want to find the place in Tazewell
County where Sarah lived during her final years. I want to stand there too. I want to
know the landscape she saw after she retired, the community in which she spent her last
years, and the place where her earthly journey finally ended at the age of 102.
I do not want to visit only the place where Sarah worked. I want to find the place where
she lived her final chapter.
I am carrying Sarah’s memory with me. But I am not going to Bristol to leave her last
image trapped in that yard.
I am returning to my studio to rewrite her history on canvas. I want to paint Sarah
“Sadie” Jefferson—not confined by the architecture of Pleasant Hill, and not diminished
by historical language that reduces endurance to devotion.
I imagine her walking down those stone steps with a single bag in her hand. The door
behind her. The yard behind her. The walls behind her. And the world opening before
her.
I want to paint the moment when she steps beyond the boundary that history placed
around her—not because I know that she ever physically walked away that way, but
because I know that her life did not end with that yard.
Her life continued through her children. Her blood continued through generations. And
eventually, it reached me.
So when I stand at the ocean today, looking toward a horizon without walls, I know that
I am standing in a freedom that Sarah could only have imagined.
She survived long enough to become my ancestor. And I am here because she was.
Beyond the yard, there is the horizon.
Beyond the horizon, there is me.
My Pilgrimage: Following Sarah’s Last Years
My journey to Bristol will now have two historical destinations: Pleasant Hill in Bristol,
Virginia, where Sarah worked and lived for 22 years, and the place in Tazewell County
where she lived after retiring and where she spent her final years.
I want to locate that final residence as carefully as possible rather than simply knowing
the county. I plan to search census records, death records, church and cemetery
records, and local historical sources. I also want to learn whether Sarah lived with either
of her sons, David or Peter, during those years.
Bud Phillips is no longer living, so I cannot ask him directly about Sarah’s final
residence. His historical work, however, remains an important starting point for this
search. I want to continue following the records he left behind and the local archives
that preserve Bristol’s history.
A Note of Historical Gratitude
V. N. “Bud” Phillips (1929–2017) was a Bristol historian, author, and the former owner
of Pleasant Hill. He died on January 9, 2017. The Bristol Historical Association continues
to preserve his newspaper articles and other historical materials in its archives. His
research is part of the path that led me to Sarah’s photograph and to this deeper search
for her story.