Ms. L. Green was the last of her immediate family. Both of her parents had been slaves. She said she knew “quite a bit” but wanted to wait awhile before telling any of her stories. She had been urged by a prominent Madison man to go back to Kentucky and pose for a picture by the old cabin where her father had been a slave. The man was to be paid for writing her family history, but Ms. Green said that if anyone got paid for her family’s history, she wanted the money. She needed money badly because she had been on a WPA project that had been discontinued.
She told this much to the fieldworker, though. Her father was a carpenter and bellboy on the Preston farm in Kentucky near Bedford. He was always treated well. During the Civil War he fought under the name of Preston, but at the close of the war he took the name of Green again. He came to Madison at the close of the war. Ms. Green’s mother was a slave near Milton, Kentucky; she did not know the exact location. Her mother’s master was also her mother’s father. The only punishment her mother ever received while in slavery was having one side of her hair clipped short for talking back to her mistress. The owner had come in just in time to hear her.