“It seems that they were just buying mileage from time to time and staying on the train to be able to get off where I got off.  The conductor told them that if they went into Little Rock with the train there would be a delegation of white people there to meet them and that the reception wouldn’t be a pleasant one, that I worked on the road, and that all the officials knew me and knew my wife, and that if I just sent a wire ahead they’d find themselves in deep.  They got off the train at the next stop, but they gave me plenty of eye, and it looked like they didn’t believe what had been told them.

“We were married only three and a half years when she died.  Her name was Lillie Love Douglass before she married me.  She was a perfect angel.  White folks tried to say that she was white.  We had two children.  Both of them are dead.  One died while giving birth to a child and the other died at the age of thirty-three.

“I married the second time.  I met my second wife the same way I met the first.  I was working on the railroad and she was traveling.  I was a coach cleaner.  We lived together three years and were separated over foolishness.  She had long beautiful hair and an old friend of hers stopped by once and said that he ought to have a lock of her hair to braid into a watch chain.  She said, ‘I’ll give you a lock.’  I said, ’You and your hair both belong to me; how are you going to give it away without asking me.’  She might have been joking, and I was not altogether serious.  But it went on from there in to a deep quarrel.  One day, I had been drinking heavily, and we had an argument over the matter.  I don’t remember what it was all about.  Anyway, she called me a liar and I slapped her before I thought.

“For two or three weeks after that we stayed together just as though nothing had happened, except that she never had anything more to say to me.  She would lie beside me at night but wouldn’t say a word.  One day I gave her a hundred dollars to buy some supplies for the store.  She was a wonderful hat maker, and we had put up a store which she operated while I was out on the road working.  When I came back that evening, the store was wide open and she was gone.  She had slipped off and gone home from the station across the river.  I didn’t find that out till the next day.  She hid during part of the night at the home of one of my friends.  And another of my friends carried her across the river and put her on the train.  I was out with a shotgun watching.  I am glad I did not meet them.  She is living in Chicago now, married to the man she wanted to give the lock of hair to and doing well the last I heard from her.  She was a good woman, just marked with a high temper.  There was no reason why we should not have lived together and gotten along well.  We loved each other and were making money hand over fist when we separated.

Opinions

“The young people are too much for me.  Women are awful now.  The young ones are too wild for me.  The old ones allow them too much freedom.  They are not given proper instruction and training by their elders.”