Updated:
05/09/2008
The Honey-Pod Tree
This autobiography was published in 1958. The title of the book was selected from the famous old landmark which once stood near Gloucester Court House. The honey pod tree shaded a slave block on which many of T. C. Walker's own relatives had been sold. The aged lawyer lived to see both the venerable tree and the slave block destroyed. In his autobiography, the once famous tree symbolizes the more subtle forms of slavery "young honeypod trees" which Walker saw emerging in the years following World War II.
Walker was just an infant when the Emancipation Proclamation was read to the slaves who gathered around the block under the honeypod tree. During his childhood, he witnessed his parents and other blacks trying to find a better life for themselves with no education and no money. At the age of 13 Walker could neither read nor write. After he finally acquired these skills at Old Poplars School, which was housed in a church, Walker scraped together 92 cents, ran away from home and knocked on the door of Hampton Institute. At this Institute the rising of this great man began.
Gazette-Journal / November 23, 1973.