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It was wonderful to have nationally known author Amy Nathan visit Washington last week and share her books and remembrances of Sarah Louise Keys Evans. For those of you who could not come to her ‘Meet the Author’ event, it is certainly our hope that Amy will come back again and share more with us about our hometown hero Sarah Louise Keys Evans when her two new books about Sarah are published.

Talking with Amy gave me a broader knowledge of Cousin Sarah’s life that I did not have before.
Conversations with Sarah filled me with a sense of her gentleness but yet strength at the same time. Her humbleness and her ability to see God’s hand and purposes in even what were difficult things has left an indelible mark on me.
One of the things I have learned from Sarah is to note even what seemed like small insignificant things, as they often carry great outcomes.

In my last week’s column about Sarah, I wrote from notes I made in one of my many conversations with her. This particular entry had scribbled notes all in the margins that I hastily wrote during our conversation. And in last week’s column, I wrote that “Sarah’s father met a visibly shaken at the Union Bus Station upon her arrival in Washington.”

Amy let me know that wasn’t the case as the account Sarah had given her was that “Sarah took a taxicab to her to her family’s home in Keysville.” I went back through my copious files on Sarah’s conversations with me and there it was. Upon looking at the scribbled noted in the margins of the first account, it read ” Sarah, once seeing her father’s reaction to the account of the indignity and in justice that her happened to her, (her arrest in a Roanoke Rapids jail for disorderly conduct, for not moving to the back of the bus when she was demanded to, so a white passenger could have her seat,) she stated she “strained to compose her visibly shaken posture in front of her dad.” “I kept wondering what was going on in his head, that his daughter had been arrested. It was there in the safety of being around her family, the weight of what had happened to her really sunk in.”

The bus station account is where a family member, my cousin Katie Harrison Wooten (Bailey) had been making arrangements with Sarah’s father to pick Sarah up upon her expected arrival. When Sarah didn’t arrive, she called the bus station to find out what happened to the bus.

Sarah was right. Small insignificant details can carry great outcomes. Those small, scribbled notes that later were neatly typed and placed in another file in their correct sequence, are the ones I should have used to write my column. Thank you, Amy, for checking that for me.

My great outcome here is, to do what my husband Milt has encouraged me to do so often, and that is to become better organized. Organization is not one of my strengths. You should see my office! Hey but I’m working on it!

Next week I’ll share how Sarah tied together a story from my third-grade Weekly Reader to my trip to Nova Scotia Canada. Oh, and thanks for reading my column!

Leesa Jones is a Washington native and the co-curator of the Washington Waterfront Underground Railroad Museum.