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Note: Address:<ADDR> 26470 Wax Road Denham Springs Louisiana 70726 United States of America
I was born on Saturday, November 17, 1923, at Liberty, Amite, Mississippi, and was delivered at home by a medical doctor. The doctor's fees were always paid by whatever you could to give him, maybe it would be a chicken, some eggs, or a pig. I don't know what was given to the doctor for delivering me, but I'm sure it had to be something good. I was named Murlie Vivian Brown, and I am the third born child of four children born to Sarah Elizabeth (Bessie) Jones, and Emerson Mirth Brown. My first recollection of my life was in 1929, at the age of three years old, and we were living at Centreville, Mississippi. Mama and Daddy worked for a man that we kids called Uncle Dick Fulton, who was not related to us. We also lived with him as he had a big house with a long front porch. I don't believe that Mama and Daddy had to pay rent as they worked for him. Mama, at age twenty five, used to cook for all the farm hands, plus do the wash, clean house, pick vegetables, milk the cows, and look after we four kids. Daddy, age twenty nine, had to work the cotton fields along with the other farm hands. "Uncle Dick" had a lot of farm hands who were mostly black, and I remember that every Saturday night, Uncle Dick would throw lots of pennies up in the air, just to see the Negro hired help scramble around in the dirt to find the pennies. I realize that I was only three years old, but I can remember a few things like helping Mama pick cotton, while pulling a sack behind me. I guess Mama let me do that so she could keep an eye on me. We lived with Uncle Dick until I was about five years old. I remember having having the whooping cough so bad that I was not able to breathe, and whenever I got to whooping and coughing, I would run to the the nearest person, and climb up as high as I could. One person I remembered was Johnny Leonard, who would lift me high in the air until I stopped coughing, and could breathe again. Around 1928 when I was five years old, our family moved to Greenwell Springs, Louisiana. We moved into a rent house located on the French Town Road. We moved several times, but stayed in different houses that we located on that same road. At one time we lived a mile back in the woods, and when I started first grade in 1929, we kids had to walk a mile through the woods to catch our school bus, and then walk all the way back home in the evening after school. I began my first year at Central Elementary School, but before we kids could catch the school bus, we had to help hoe strawberries. Daddy had always planted a garden at every house we moved in, and he also planted a strawberry patch. One morning I was playing around with the hoe that Mama had just sharpened, and cut my foot pretty bad, so Mama took a needle, pulled the skin back into place, and that was the end of my strawberry days. No one would believe the kind of houses we had to live in. The houses didn't have screens on the windows, and the cracks were so big in the walls, we could see through them. I remember one time we moved into an old house that had a kitchen table in it, and while I was playing under the table, I found some gum stuck under the table so I pulled the gum off and started chewing it. Mama saw me and asked where I had gotten the gum, and I told her. She was horrified, but let me keep the gum because she guessed by now that I had chewed all the germs out. Every morning before school, Mama used to get up early to fix home made hot biscuits for breakfast and our school lunch. I don't remember what she put in our biscuits, probably peanut butter and jelly, but when lunch time came the rich kids would always want to trade their light bread lunches with us. We were always happy to trade with them as we had never eaten light bread before. To be continued:
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