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her, him and her had one child and she went in the name of Maggie Reed. And this old lady Adeline Reed, who was Adeline Milliken before Jubal Reed married her, she had had other men before him. I knowed em: old man Coot Ramsey come in contact with her enough to have four children and they all went under the Ramsey name—Roland Ramsey, Reuben Ramsey, Waldo Ramsey, Hector Ramsey. And the last time old lady Adeline—I don’t say the first time and the last time, I say this: when I come in the knowledge of that family by my daddy marryin in it, she had married to a man by the name of Jubal Reed. She weren’t married to old man Coot Ramsey—he just gettin children by this woman—and she went in the name of Milliken, Adeline Milliken. And my daddy married in that family to the only child that old lady Adeline Milliken and old man Jubal Reed had—she went in the name of Reed, Maggie Reed. And she was a half-sister to old man Waldo Ramsey; Adeline Millikenwas the mother for both of em. And I married Waldo Ramsey’s daughter, in 1906, who was this old lady Adeline Milliken’s granddaughter. My daddy married Waldo Ramsey’s half-sister, Maggie Reed. And I jumped up and married Waldo Ramsey’s daughter. That made Maggie Reed, you might say, my wife’s half-auntie, by Waldo bein Maggie’s brother by the same woman. Well, that drawed me in to be my stepmother’s brother’s son-in-law—that’s the way we mixed.
    So my daddy married Maggie Reed and him and her was the father and mother of thirteen children—my old daddy was a rooster, he was a humdinger. Well, she lingered along and I don’t remember what year she died, I was married and gone. Done become twenty-one years old. Well, she died. Got too hot and taken a bath one night, clipped out just like that. The night she died she’d put part of a day’s work in the field. Went to the house out of the field and taken a bath. That prostrated her and she died. Well, that was my daddy’s third wife gone. TJ’s mother was a mighty good kind woman to we, my mother’s children. She was a poor woman as usual amongst the colored race, but she was as good to us as she could be. And she was the mother of thirteen children for my daddy, two sets of twins. And today there aint but four livin out of all that number of children. Five of em died when they was little; lost all them twins. I was at home when the first child died and she was a good-sized little girl: her name was Patsey. Typhoid fever killed her. One of the sets of twins come into this world before Patsey died and one come after. But they was all behind TJ and all behind Lorna and if I don’t make no mistakes they was all behind Judy. But the twins all died little. Today, out of them thirteen children, every one of em is dead except TJ, Bob, and Willis—them’s boys—and Tessie, the only girl livin. Bob is in Detroit, last I heard of him; Tessie’s in Birmingham; Willis is in Birmingham; and TJ, he’s here.
    I didn’t know what it was to suffer for nothin while my mother lived. So far as somethin to eat, I didn’t know what it was to go hungry in her lifetime. We killed plenty of meat in the fall; my daddy’d raise from three to four big hogs every year—that’s all he done, raise meat to eat and what he didn’t raise he got in the woods—and killed game. He killed game goin and a comin too. But aftermy mother died I knowed what it was to eat only dry bread or put it in water and mash it up. And just for a change in taste, I had a knack of mashin up a piece of old cornbread in water and sprinklin a little salt over it, and eat it. I knowed what it was to do that after my mother died. It really wasn’t a change in my daddy; he was already providin only when it suited him. But my mother would take food from her own dinner and reserve it for her children. But after she died, if there was