Fairview Street, where Green Willbanks lives is a section of shabby cottages encircled by privet hedges.
As the visitor carefully ascended the shaky steps to his house a mulatto man, who was sitting on the veranda, quickly arose. "Good morning," he said, "Yes mam, this is Green Willbanks. Have a seat in the swing." The porch furniture was comprised of a chair, a swing, and a long bench. Green is tall, slender, and stooped; a man with white hair and grizzled face. A white broadcloth shirt, white cotton trousers, blue socks, and low-cut black shoes made up his far from immaculate costume.
The old man's eyes brightened when he was asked to give the story of his life. His speech showed but little dialect, except when he was carried away by interest and emotion, and his enunciation was remarkably free from Negroid accent.
"I don't mind telling you what I know," he began, "but I was such a little chap when the war ended that there's mighty little I can recollect about slavery time, and it seems that your chief interest is in that period. I was born on a plantation the other side of Commerce, Georgia, in Jackson County. My Ma and Pa were Mary and Isom Willbanks; they were raised on the same plantation where I was born. Ma was a field hand, and this time of the year when work was short in the field—laying-by time, we called it—and on rainy days she spun thread and wove cloth. As the thread left the spinning wheel it went on a reel where it was wound into hanks, and then it was carried to the loom to be woven into cloth. Pa had a little trade; he made shoes and baskets, and Old Boss let him sell them. Pa didn't make shoes for the slaves on our plantation; Old Boss bought them ready-made and had them shipped here from the West.
"Me and Jane, Sarah, Mitchell, and Willie were the five children in our family. Oh! Miss, I was not big enough to do much work. About the most I done was pick up chips and take my little tin bucket to the spring to get a cool, fresh drink for Old Miss. Us children stayed 'round the kitchen and drunk lots of buttermilk. Old Miss used to say, 'Give my pickaninnies plenty of buttermilk.' I can see that old churn now; it helt about seven or eight gallons.
"Our houses? Slaves lived in log cabins built the common way. There was lots of forest pine in those days. Logs were cut the desired length and notches put in each end so they would fit closely and have as few cracks as possible, when they stacked them for a cabin. They sawed pine logs into blocks and used a frow to split them into planks that were used to cover the cracks between the logs. Don't you know what a frow is? That's a wooden wedge that you drive into a pine block by hitting it with a heavy wooden mallet, or maul, as they are more commonly called. They closed the cracks in some of the cabins by daubing them with red mud. The old stack chimneys were made of mud and sticks. To make a bed, they first cut four posts, usually of pine, and bored holes through them with augers; then they made two short pieces for the head and foot. Two long pieces for the sides were stuck through the auger holes and the bedstead was ready to lay on the slats or cross pieces to hold up the mattress. The best beds had heavy cords, wove crossways and lengthways, instead of slats. Very few slaves had corded beds. Mattresses were not much; they were made of suggin sacks filled with straw. They called that straw 'Georgia feathers.' Pillows were made of the same things. Suggin cloth was made of coarse flax wove in a loom. They separated the flax into two grades; fine for the white folks, and coarse for the Negroes.
"The only one of my grandparents I can bring to memory now is Grandma Rose on my Pa's side. She was some worker, a regular man-woman; she could do any kind of work a man could do. She was a hot horse in her time and it took an extra good man to keep up with her when it came to work.
"Children were not allowed to do much work, because their masters desired them to have the chance to grow big and strong, and therefore they had few opportunities to earn money of their own. I never did own any money during slavery days, but I saw plenty of ten cent greenbacks (shinplasters).
"White children and slave children played around the plantation together but they were not allowed to fight. They had to be on friendly terms with each other.
"What about our food? The biggest thing we had was buttermilk, some sweet milk, and plenty of cornbread, hog meat, and peas. As a rule we had wheat bread once a week, usually on Sunday. All kinds of fruits were plentiful in their seasons. Each slave family was permitted to have separate garden space, in fact, Old Boss insisted that they work their own gardens, and they raised plenty of vegetables. Grown folks had rabbits and 'possums but I never did get much 'quainted with them. We fished in the cricks and rills 'round the plantation and brought in lots of hornyheads and perch. You never saw any hornyheads? Why they is just fish a little bigger and longer than minnows and they have little horns on their heads. We caught a good many eels too; they look like snakes, but folks call them eels. I wasn't much 'quainted with them fish they brought from way down South; they called them mullets.