9781422274248

Women in the House Alice Green was born into slavery on a plantation in Alabama around 1860. Her father, Charles Green, worked in the fields, while her mother Milly worked as the cook in the “big house” where the white plantation owners lived. Alice was part of a large family: she had two older sisters, and would later have four younger siblings. Because Milly Green worked in the house, she had the a close relationship with the white children in her care. Her daughter Alice described this relationship when she was interviewed during the late 1930s, as part of a federal government program to record and preserve the life stories of former slaves. “Mammy, she was the cook up at the big house, and when the white children came back from school in the afternoon, she would ask them to show her how to read a little book she carried around in her blouse all the time, and to tell her the other things they had learned in school that day,” then 76-year-old Alice told an interviewer from the Federal Writers Project. “They [taught] her how to read and write.” Alice recalled the family treated her parents and the other slaves fairly well, although she also described a savage beating her father received for leaving the plantation without permission. After the Civil War ended in 1865, Alice reported that the white mistress of the plantation begged her slaves not to leave. The Green family continued living and working at the plantation for a year after the end of the war.

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