Robert Henry

Robert Henry was 82, active and neatly dressed in a tweed coat and striped tie, when he was interviewed at his daughter's cottage on Billups Street in Athens, Georgia. His parents, Robert and Martha Henry, were born in Oglethorpe County and later bought by P. W. Sayles, who held about seventy people on a thousand-acre plantation about 18 miles from Washington in Wilkes County. Robert was the oldest of eight children. His father was the butler and his mother the head seamstress, and at eight Robert began training to wait on the table, where two servants fanned away flies with peacock-feather fans during meals.

Each enslaved household had an acre or two to farm for itself on Saturday mornings. Saturday nights brought square dances in the barn loft, with fiddles, beaten buckets and reed "blowing quills." There was a separate church for the enslaved, though the same preacher served both. Two of the enslaver's sons went to war and only one came back. After the war, Union soldiers took nearly all the livestock that hadn't been hidden in the swamps and the silver that hadn't been buried under the currant bushes. He described plantation life fondly, but he would not agree that he preferred it to his life now.