The cotton was gathered in bags of bear grass and deposited in baskets woven with strips of white oak that had been dried in the sun.

Willis remembers the time when a slave on the plantation escaped and went north to live.  This man managed to communicate with his family somehow, and it was whispered about that he was “living very high” and actually saving money with which to buy his family.  He was even going to school.  This fired all the slaves with an ambition to go north and this made them more than usually interested in the outcome of the war between the states.  He was too young to fully understand the meaning of freedom but wanted very much to go away to some place where he could earn enough money to buy his mother a real silk dress.  He confided this information to her and she was very proud of him but gave him a good spanking for fear he expressed this desire for freedom to his young master or mistress.

Prayer meetings were very frequent during the days of the war and very often the slaves were called in from the fields and excused from their labors so they could hold these prayer meetings, always praying God for the safe return of their master.

The master did not return after the war and when the soldiers in blue came through that section the frightened women were greatly dependent upon their slaves for protection and livelihood.  Many of these black man chose loyalty to their dead masters to freedom and shouldered the burden of the support of their former mistresses cheerfully.

After the war Willis’ father was one of those to remain with his widowed mistress.  Other members of his family left as soon as they were freed, even his wife.  They thus remained separated until her death.

Willis saw his first bedspring about 50 years ago and he still thinks a feather mattress superior to the store-bought variety.  He recalls a humorous incident which occurred when he was a child and had been introduced for the first time to the task of picking a goose.

After demonstrating how it was done to a group of slave children, the person in charge had gone about his way leaving them busily engaged in picking the goose.  They had been told that the one gathering the most feathers would receive a piece of money.  Sometimes later the overseer returned to find a dozen geese that had been stripped of all the feathers.  They had been told to pick only the pin feathers beneath the wings and about the bodies of the geese.  Need we guess what happened to the over ambitious children?

He had heard of ice long before he looked upon it and he only thought of it as another wild experiment.  Why buy ice, when watermelons and butter could be ley down into the well to keep cool?

One of Willis’ happiest moments was when he earned enough money to buy his first pair of patern leather shoes.  To possess a paid of store bought shoes had been his ambition since he was a child, when he had to shine the shoes of his master and those of the master’s children.