"They had a good opinion of their house servants. That is how she and my
father came to belong to different families. One white man would say to
the other, 'I got a good boy. I'm going to let him come over to see your
girl.' He would be talking about a Negro man that worked around his
house and a Negro girl that worked for the other man. That would be all
right. So that's the way my father went to see my mother. He was married
in the way they always married in those days. You know how it was. There
was no marriage at all. They just went on out and got the woman and the
white man said, 'There she is. You are man and wife.'