Upon entering, I was invited to have a chair and "rest my hat". After
seating myself and making inquiry as to their health, I told them the
object of my visit, and their faces beamed when I asked if they
remembered "slave days". Aunt Lizzie set down the can of beans she was
preparing for their meal and said with a clasp of her hands, "Lawsey,
Honey, what I do know would fill a book".

Uncle Wes had been a "shut-in" for eleven months, and was in bed, but
was cheerful and bright with an intelligent memory, rarely found in one
his age. Uncle Wes tells me that he was born May 21, 1864 in Garrard
County, near Cartersville, and was first a slave of Mrs. Eliza Kennedy,
who later married John Yeakey, of that section of the county. "My
father's name was Ben Woods, my mother's name was Janie Woods, but I do
not know what family she belonged to except the Woods. My master owned
about three or four hundred acres of land, and there were about twenty
slaves, including the children.

There were three or four cabins for the slaves to live in, not so very
far from the house. The cabin where my mother and father lived was the
closest to the house, for my mother did the cooking. Our cabin was one
long room, with a loft above, which we reached with a ladder. There was
one big bed, with a trundle bed, which was on wooden rollers and was
shoved under the big bed in the daytime. The oldest boys slept in a big
wooden bed in the loft. The cabins were built of logs and chinked with
rock and mud. The ceiling was of joists, and my mother used to hang the
seed that we gathered in the fall, to dry from these joists. Some of the
chimneys were made with sticks and chinked with mud, and would sometimes
catch on fire. Later people learned to build chimneys of rock with big
wide fire places, and a hearth of stone, which made them safer from
fire.