Jake Green

Jake Green was 85 and laughing with surprising vigor when Ruby Pickens Tartt interviewed him near Livingston, Alabama. He was a small boy when the war began. He and his parents, Molly and Dan Whitehead, were enslaved by Lam Whitehead a few miles from Coatopa, about ten miles east of Livingston. His father was the house servant.

He was a great storyteller. He told of Dick, a fiddler who claimed to be sick and had his meals brought to him for seven years, until the enslaver crept up and caught him singing, "Fool my master seven years, gonna fool him seven more." He said four men on the place, including his father and the foremen of the plow and hoe hands, could not be struck by anyone, and that they were hired out to other farms because they could pick five hundred pounds of cotton apiece before sundown. A neighboring planter, Buck Brasfield, was so cruel that his workers often ran away. When a man named Rich Parker visited a hoodoo doctor and Brasfield fell ill, Brasfield got out of bed and stormed into the field shouting that "old Buck" had risen again, and the frightened workers crouched in the rows like partridges.

Parker stayed hidden until well after the surrender. Jake and his father were renting and farming on shares when Parker finally walked up, asking why nobody had told him, and began singing, "Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last."