him to call on me. He called, bringing chestnuts and candy for the
children. By this means we got them to leave us alone in the room. Then
I sat on his lap. He made a proposal to me and I readily consented. Why
I did so, I do not know, but that I did is true. He visited me several
times after that and each time I was indiscreet. I did not care after
the first time. In fact I could not have resisted, and had no desire to
resist.

When asked by her husband why she told him she had been outraged, she
said: "I had several reasons for telling you. One was the neighbors saw
the fellows here, another was, I was afraid I had contracted a loathsome
disease, and still another was that I feared I might give birth to a Negro
baby. I hoped to save my reputation by telling you a deliberate lie." Her
husband horrified by the confession had Offett, who had already served
four years, released and secured a divorce.

There are thousands of such cases throughout the South, with the
difference that the Southern white men in insatiate fury wreak their
vengeance without intervention of law upon the Afro-Americans who consort
with their women. A few instances to substantiate the assertion that some
white women love the company of the Afro-American will not be out of
place. Most of these cases were reported by the daily papers of the South.

In the winter of 1885-86 the wife of a practicing physician in Memphis, in
good social standing whose name has escaped me, left home, husband and
children, and ran away with her black coachman. She was with him a month
before her husband found and brought her home. The coachman could not be
found. The doctor moved his family away from Memphis, and is living in
another city under an assumed name.

In the same city last year a white girl in the dusk of evening screamed at
the approach of some parties that a Negro had assaulted her on the street.
He was captured, tried by a white judge and jury, that acquitted him of
the charge. It is needless to add if there had been a scrap of evidence on
which to convict him of so grave a charge he would have been convicted.

Sarah Clark of Memphis loved a black man and lived openly with him. When
she was indicted last spring for miscegenation, she swore in court that
she was _not_ a white woman. This she did to escape the penitentiary and
continued her illicit relation undisturbed. That she is of the lower class
of whites, does not disturb the fact that