"I met my wife going home. I was a train porter between here and
Memphis. She was put in my care to see that she took her train all right
out of Memphis, Tennessee, going on farther. I fell in love with her and
commenced courting her right from there. She was so white in color that
you couldn't tell she was colored by looking at her. After I married
her, I was bringing her home, and three white men from another town got
on the train and followed us, thinking she was white. Every once in a
while they would come back and peep in the Negro coach. Sometimes they
would come in and sit down and smoke and watch us. My sister notice it
and called my attention to it. I went to the conductor and complained.
He called their hand.
"It seems that they were just buying mileage from time to time and
staying on the train to be able to get off where I got off. The
conductor told them that if they went into Little Rock with the train
there would be a delegation of white people there to meet them and that
the reception wouldn't be a pleasant one, that I worked on the road, and
that all the officials knew me and knew my wife, and that if I just sent
a wire ahead they'd find themselves in deep. They got off the train at
the next stop, but they gave me plenty of eye, and it looked like they
didn't believe what had been told them.
"We were married only three and a half years when she died. Her name was
Lillie Love Douglass before she married me. She was a perfect angel.
White folks tried to say that she was white. We had two children. Both
of them are dead. One died while giving birth to a child and the other
died at the age of thirty-three.
"I married the second time. I met my second wife the same way I met the
first. I was working on the railroad and she was traveling. I was a
coach cleaner. We lived together three years and were separated over
foolishness. She had long beautiful hair and an old friend of hers
stopped by once and said that he ought to have a lock of her hair to
braid into a watch chain. She said, 'I'll give you a lock.' I said, 'You
and your hair both belong to me; how are you going to give it away
without asking me.' She might have been joking, and I was not altogether
serious. But it went on from there in to a deep quarrel. One day, I had
been drinking heavily, and we had an argument over the matter. I don't
remember what it was all about. Anyway, she called me a liar and I
slapped her before I thought.
"For two or three weeks after that we stayed together just as though
nothing had happened, except that she never had anything more to say to
me. She would lie beside me at night but wouldn't say a word. One day I
gave her a hundred dollars to buy some supplies for the store. She was a
wonderful hat maker, and we had put up a store which she operated while
I was out on the road working. When I came back that evening, the store
was wide open and she was gone. She had slipped off and gone home from
the station across the river. I didn't find that out till the next day.
She hid during part of the night at the home of one of my friends. And
another of my friends carried her across the river and put her on the
train. I was out with a shotgun watching. I am glad I did not meet them.
She is living in Chicago now, married to the man she wanted to give the
lock of hair to and doing well the last I heard from her. She was a good
woman, just marked with a high temper. There was no reason why we should
not have lived together and gotten along well. We loved each other and
were making money hand over fist when we separated.