“I went down yonder to get help from the county.  At last they taken me on and I got groceries three times.  After that I couldn’t get nothin’ no more.  They said my papers were made out incorrectly.  I asked the worker to make it out correctly because I couldn’t read and write.  She said she wasn’t supposed to do that but she would do it.  She made it out for me.  A short time later, the postman brought me a letter.  I handed it to a lady to read for me, and she said, ‘This is your old age check.’  You don’t know how much help that thing’s been to me.

Ku Klux

“The Ku Klux never bothered me and they never bothered any of my people.

Opinions

“The young people pass by me and I don’t know nothing about ’em.  I know they are quite indifferent from what I was.  When I come old enough to want a wife, I knowed what sort of wife I wanted.  God blessed me and I happened to run up on the kind of woman I wanted.  I made an engagement with her, and I didn’t have a dollar.  I was engaged to marry for three years before I married.  I knowed it wouldn’t do for me to marry her the way she was raised and I didn’t have nothing.  It looked curious for me to want that woman.  I wanted her, and I had sense.  I had sense enough to know how I must carry myself to get her.  Now it looks like a young man wants all the women and ain’t satisfied with nary one.

“My youngest son had a fine wife and was satisfied.  He took up with what I call a whiskey head.  He’s been swapping horses ever since.  That is the baby boy of mine.  You know good and well a man couldn’t get along that way.

“These young men will keep this one over here for a few days, and then that one over there for a few days.  It shows like he wants them all.

Voting

“I have voted.  I don’t now.  Since I lost out, I ain’t voted.

Slave Houses

“You might say slave houses was nothing.  Log houses, made out of logs and chinked up with sticks and mud in the cracks.  Chimneys made with sticks and mud.  Two rooms in our house.  No windows, just cracks.  All furniture was homemade.  Take a two by four and bore a hole in it and put a cross piece in it and you had a bed.

“They made stools for chairs and made tables too.  Food was kept in the smokehouse.  For rations, they would give so much meat, so much molasses, and so much meal.  No sugar and no coffee.  They used to make tea out of sage, and out of sassafras, and that was the coffee.

Marriages

“I been married twice.  The first time was out in North Carolina.  The last time was in this city.  I didn’t stay with that last woman but four days.  It took me just that long to find out who and who.  She didn’t want me; she wanted my money, and she thought I had more of it than I did.  She got all I had though.  I had just fifty dollars and she got that.  I am going to get me a good woman, though, as soon as I can get divorced.