Mama was the storyteller at home and she told us about our grandparents and our great-grandparents and she told us about our fathers' grandparents, and in the autobiography that I'm writing, she wrote the first part of the book, 38 pages,  and she told everything about -- I mean, she told about the life that we lived before I was born. My grandfather was named Charles Coffey and he was a slave until he was 14 and his mother was named Ann Carter and she was a slave, I guess all her life, and she brought five or nine children. One time, mama said it was nine when she got a little older. I think it was five boys she had. Probably by an Irishman or a man who was like an octoroon. He was a slaver anyway, and when slavery was declared illegal, they sent her out of the house with a dime and a couple of blankets and they walked across Missouri and several of them had tent time and ragtime, like that. My mother lived in abandoned street cars with my father and my grandfather and my grandmother because my father -- my grandfather, mama used to complain about it a lot, had lost his zest for achieving anything. Also, I mean, there were awful things that she remembered that he did. He was a degraded man in some ways. I asked her if she thought it was because of slavery and she said some people are just born low, but I know better now, you know. My mother's mother was a child. She was -- there were 21 children. Her father was an African. Mama said he was never a slave. His name was Roberts, Henry Roberts, but he didn't have an African name, and his wife was named Katherine, and she said Katherine was probably an Indian. She had long hair and she was pale-skinned, she said, because they didn't let them have black women then, and they had 21 children, and my grandmother was a school teacher. She met my grandfather on a boat, one of those gambling boats. They were total opposites, and my father, she told us that his father was mostly Indian and he had some African, but his name was Wooldridge, which is an English name, right? And he went to jail for killing two men, and I think he served some time in Pittsburgh, and my grandmother's name was Nellie, Nellie Wooldridge, who gave birth to my father, Alexander, who was an only child and a genius. He probably would have been a singer, but he opted to be a family man, and they had the same problems that people have today in marriage. There's not enough room in the house for a man and a woman, let alone a man and a bunch of children, you know. I think a man should have his own house and a woman should have her own house. I really believe in that. After all is said and done, I think I really -- I would like to practice polygamy. I'd like to try it anyway, you know. So, I think the two of them had the bloodline. Even though, on the one level, we were degraded, on another, we were privileged because we carry all the blood that made us healthy and we don't have dread disease. There's about a 150 of us. When my mother died, there were 84 children. She was 84 years old when she died and there was a child for every year of her life. There had been 92 and some of them had passed away. She left 84 children. There must be a 150 of us now, and I'm really thankful to my mother and father for the lives that they lived and for their spirit.