She was born in Mississippi around 1833, and as a teenager was forced to relocate to Port Sullivan, Texas, when the Foster family — Martha Ann and Harry Foster, who enslaved her — moved there. She was approximately 16 years old.

When the Civil War ended, she was among those emancipated from the Foster household. She married Henry Johnson in 1868, and the two built a life together in the Port Sullivan and Branchville area, where they would remain for the rest of their lives. Together they raised seven children: Susan, Charley, Ebbie, Virginia, Mary, Waarie, and Loueselle. In her final years, she lived with her oldest daughter in Milam County.

The photograph shown here was taken sometime in the early 1930s and pictures her alongside a descendant of the Foster family — evidence that some connection between the two families persisted across the decades following emancipation. She passed away in 1934 at the age of 101.