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and cook the best red beans I believe I have ever eaten. There along about that time my father and brother Jerome got a job handling 4 ft. wood on to the railroad, so he went to Gainesville to see if Mrs. Schielthies would board me through the week and he would pick be up and take me home on Friday evenings. Mrs. Schielthies had several children but she took me and I went to school there that term. Miss Emma Thompson was the teacher at that time. Later on she married Tom Dean from Pearlington, Miss. One day I asked her why she let me off with murder when I was so bad? She said well;
I felt sorry for you because you seemed like a little orphan child. One girl about 14 or 15 years of age was so wicked it was pitiful. The other girls would put me up to do all kinds of things to her. I'd slip up behind her and pull her ribbon out of her hair, take a stick and pull her dress up and she'd run and try to catch me but I guess it was a good thing she never could and "did" she let that language fly? This all took place at recess.
Going back to my school days when I boarded at Mrs. Schielthies'es she'd go to look for me and find me sitting on the front doorsteps crying and she'd ask me what was the matter, was I sick? and the answer was always no! nothing. And I didn't really know myself what was wrong other than I wanted to go home. I believe they call it being homesick.
When I was nine years old my daddy would leave me in that big two story house which was 12 ft from the floor to ceiling both bottom story and top while he'd go to Logtown for things we needed. As I have said earlier that sometimes I'd stay at Mrs. Carvers. We had a real large oak tree in our back yard right close to the back gallery and when the wind would blow pretty stiff the limbs would blow back and fourth on the shingle roof and would make a terrible noise, so I'd get the lantern and light it and go upstairs down through that long room with two windows in each end of the room then I'd go back in that dark attic and when I'd get to the back end over the kitchen and dining room I'd hear the limbs raking over the roof then I'd go back down stairs and be perfectly satisfied. One day I was by myself and was standing at the kitchen door looking out and I saw a negro man coming down over the hill, as the old road ran right between our front hard fence and my daddies field fence. And for some reason or other I kept watching him until he got nearly up to the house then I ran into my daddies
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