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was on my way. He had a friend who was in the Army with him who had come South, his name was Henry Eggerts and he kept writing to my father to come South and he was always bragging on the climate and many other things so when my daddy lost his grain crop one year and he went broke he decided to come South, so he gave away house hold goods, his stock and sold the home and loaded his family on the train and headed South. Landed in a little town called Nicholson, Miss, where I was born six months after their arrival. This friend of his wrote him and told him if he'd send him five hundred dollars he'd have two large rooms built on to his house and we could live there until my daddy could find a place to buy. So my daddy did just that but after we had been there for a month or so after I was born Henry told my father he'd have to get out because the two little ones were getting on his nerves so then he had to hunt a place to stay until he could find a place to buy. So he found a place on a farm where no one was living and he bought a horse, one of those great big broad-breasted horses that could pull a ton. My daddy named him Dandy and when the ground was donated to Napoleon for a cemetery, Dandy helped clean it up. Pulled trees, logs and stumps out that several men said two oxen couldn't budge. I've seen my daddy load a wagon with dirt and fertilizer so heavy that Dandy would have to get down on his belly to pull and I'd tell him that was wicked and he'd say, I gollies; he'll get it there which he always did. When my mother died before I was two years old, that's where they put her to rest. She was only forty two years old when she left this world. After I was six years old my father married again, he married a woman twenty six years and they had one daughter, she was a beautiful child, name Carrie Elma. Her mother's name before she married was Irene Downing. Her father was a Baptist minister.
When Elma was three her mother left to go to her people then eventually ended up in Austin, Texas. Then Irene married again and never stayed married only a short time when she and him were separated. So my oldest sister Emma had kept house and took care of my youngest brother Jerome Jr., Stella and myself. She had been going with a fine looking also a fine young man since before my mother died so when I was six years old he asked her when could they get married and she told him she couldn't think of leaving the two other children and me only a baby with no mother to care for them, so he said ask your father if we can take Pearl with us and sister Olla who was