Page:Micheaux - The Conquest, The Story of a Negro Pioneer (1913).djvu/217

 hundred and sixty acres to six hundred and forty acres, and one colored man there at that time owned eleven hundred acres with twelve thousand dollars in the bank.

Wherever I had been, however, I had always found a certain class in large and small towns alike whose object in life was obviously nothing, but who dressed up and aped the white people.

After Miss Rooks had married I was again in the condition of the previous year, but during the summer I had written to a young lady who had been teaching in M—boro and whom I had met while visiting Miss Rooks. Her name was Orlean McCraline, and her father was a minister and had been the pastor of our church in M—pls when I was a baby, but for the past seventeen years had been acting as presiding elder over the southern Illinois district. Miss McCraline had answered my letters and during the summer we had been very agreeable correspondents, and when in September I contracted for three relinquishments of homestead filings, I decided to ask her to marry me but to come and file on a Tipp county claim first.

To get the money for the purchase of the relinquishments, I had mortgaged my three hundred and twenty acres for seven thousand, six hundred dollars, the relinquishments costing in the neighborhood of six thousand, four hundred dollars. October was the time when the land would be open to homestead filing, and Miss McCraline had written that she would like to homestead. After sending my sister and grandmother the money to