Sometimes they come
and ask her to cook them something special good to eat. Both my father
and mother were fine cooks. That's when we lived at Third and
Cumberland. I stayed home till I was sixteen and helped with the cooking
and washing and ironing. I never worked in a cottonfield. The boys did.
All us girls were reared about the house. We were trained to be lady's
maids and houseworkers. I married when I was sixteen. That husband died
four years later, and the next year I married this man, Joel Randolph
White. Married him in March, 1879. In those days you could put a house
on leased ground. Could lease it for five years at a time. My father put
up a house on Tenth and Scott. Old man Haynie owned the land and let us
live in the house for $25.00 a year until father's money was all gone;
then we had to move out. The first home my father really owned was at
1220 Spring street, what is now. Course then, it was away out in the
country. A white lawyer from the north--B.F. Rice was his name--got my
brother Jimmie to work in his office. Jimmie had been in school most all
his life and was right educated for colored boy then. Mr. Rice finally
asked him how would he like to study law. So he did; but all the time he
wanted to be a preacher. Mr. Rice tell Jimmie to go on studying law.
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