[HW: Dist. 1
Ex. Slave #21
(with Photograph)]
[HW: "JOHN COLE">[
Subject: A SLAVE REMEMBERS
District: No. 1 W.P.A
Editor: Edward Ficklen
Supervisor: Joseph E. Jaffee
[MAY 8 1937]
A SLAVE REMEMBERS
The front door of a little vine-clad cottage on Billups Street, in Athens, Georgia quaked open and John Cole, ex-slave confronted a "gov'mint man."
Yes, he was the son of Lucius Cole and Betsy Cole, was in his 86th year, and remembered the time "way back" when other gov'mint men with their strange ways had descended on Athens.
And far beyond that, back to the time when they had tried him out as a scullion boy in the big town house where his mother was the cook, but it seemed that the trays always escaped his clumsy young hands.
So "Marse Henry" had put him on the 200 acre Oglethorpe plantation as apprentice to training of the farm horses whose large unmanageableness he found more manageable than the dainty china of the banker's house. He simply had followed more after his father, the carriage driver than his mother, the cook.
Of course, all fifteen of the hands worked from sun-up to sun-down, but his aunt was the plantation cook, and it was not so bad there.