Marshal Butler

Marshal Butler was born on Christmas Day, which made him, he joked, "the only niggah that knows exactly how old he be," though he did not know the year. He was eighty-odd when interviewed. He grew up in Washington, Wilkes County, Georgia. His mother, Harriet Butler, was enslaved by Frank Collar and worked as a maid in the house; his father, John Butler, was a field hand enslaved by Ben Butler some miles away, who allowed him only two passes a week to see his wife. Marshal had nine siblings. When the war ended, his father came home to them.

The Collar plantation held two hundred or more people. Marshal worked in the field from the time he was "knee high to a grasshopper," eating breakfast in the dark and coming in at sundown. He had a mule named George and sang a song about it. The enslaver gave his mother four acres to farm for her family, and they worked it on Saturdays, raising a bale of cotton and garden vegetables. Pickers had to pick 200 pounds a day or be switched in the barn, though he said the mistress sometimes stopped the whippings.

Saturday nights were for frolics with fiddle and tin-can drumming, "Little Liza Jane" and lemonade and whiskey. On Sundays they attended the white church, sitting on one side, and were baptized in a pool inside the church. Once, after slipping off without a pass to see a girl on the Palmer plantation five miles away, he was caught by masked patrollers and given thirty licks with buckled straps; he ran the rest of the way home. He was living in Georgia with family when interviewed.