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Sept 7-1991
When I was sixteen years of age I had five boyfriends at one time. Only corresponding mostly. One I was engaged to was in Galveston, Texas. He only got to come to Mississippi about twice a year, but when he'd come to his sisters who lived not quite a half a mile above us, his sister would write me a note and tell me to come up there as her brother was there. So one night I asked the girl who was spending a week
with me, what could I tell my daddy for him to let me go up to Mrs-----------for a little while
as I never had a grain of salt to put in his pancakes the next morning so he pulled his glasses down over his nose and thought for a minute, then said I guess so if you'll go the back way because the main road ran right through a lane on which there was a field and our front yard fence where people of all kind traveled. They had a Salon in Gainesville across the Pearl river and white and black were going all times of the day and night to that Salon. So we told my dad we would go the path back of our field fence. So we stayed about an hour and we had not been there long when his sister brought out a guitar and gave it to him, then she said Pearl, you go to the organ and you all play and sing some of those old songs. Casey Jones, bye bye black bird, I wonder who's kissing her now and I wonder whose buying the wine for the lips that used to be mine, the Devil's Ball and so many of those old songs that come out the years of 1912-13- and 14. So we played and sang for her a little while, then she took my friend and the children into the kitchen so then is when he asked me to marry him and I promised I would but I said you'll have to wait for me as I've promised my father I wouldn't get married until I was eighteen years of age. So he said I'll be waiting for you although it will be hard to wait two long years so I hope you'll be true to your word. So then he and one of the girls walked home with us and so I got my first kiss from a man that night. The only time he ever offered to kiss me as many times as we had been together. He said he had gone with dozens of girls and was engaged to several but never loved any of them as he did me. When Willie Hover came into the scene I wrote him and told him we wouldn't be corresponding any longer as I'd found some one else I loved and he never wrote me again, but he wrote his sister and told her he'd gone with a many a girl who was crazy about him but he said I was the only one he had really ever loved. He said he never would have thought my heart was made of stone. His sister said he wrote
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