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We later learned that despite the fulminations of that old white man each time he came for the rent, the thought of a mother and her five children being put out into the street was so disturbing to him that he had paid the $25 per month rent out of his own pocket for most of that last year we were there.  He knew Mother could not pay it, but where were we to go?  The new owners were very nice people, but they did not buy a house for their family to have to share it with a woman and her five children that they did not even know! We had to move!  Within a month, we had to be out.

Mother trudged up and down Welch looking for housing, some kind of place for us to live.  Welch was a difficult place to get around in because there was no public transportation on our side of the railroad tracks.  The entire area consisted of hills, under hills, under more hills, with chasms, ravines, gulches and hollows. Though it was arduous, Mother continued walking and looking because the month was swiftly coming to a close.  Finally, someone told her about an empty room in an old house on the hill next to the Methodist church that they thought might be available.

There were four rooms in that house.  Two on the first floor were separated by a hall, and the two on the second floor were also separated by a hall.  Three of them were occupied. On the first floor across from our room lived Miss Ella, an elderly woman who was kind to us and who sometimes shared with us kids something special that she had cooked.   On the second floor directly above us was a woman with two boys who went to the same school that we did. We were not really allowed to play or associate with them because Mother said that they "were not up to proper standard."  They and their mother were loud and used profanity in almost every conversation.  They were not required to read nor were there any educational expectations made of them.  Across from them lived a single woman who was said to be a prostitute.  We hardly ever saw her, but we did see men regularly going up to her room at night.  Sometimes my brother Joe, and some of his friends would creep up the stairs when she had company and try to peek through the keyhole to see what they could see. Their snickering outside that door one night almost got them caught!  Then, one time I opened our door to the hall and saw the father of one of the girls in my class going out the front door after being up there.  At nine years old, with no notions yet of the ways of the world, I wondered why in heaven's name he was so far away from where he lived, which was a few hills away!

All six of us lived in our one room, which had a tiny alcove attached to it that served as a make-do closet.  In that room were two 3/4 beds, Mother's wedding cedar chest, a wooden crate to hold plates, knives, forks and pots.  There was also a coal stove that was used for both heating and cooking.  Making a fire meant collecting kindling from the woods behind the house and buying (on rare occasions) or picking up several lumps of coal from the railroad tracks two street levels below where we lived.   Mother sent us children down to the tracks to collect the lumps of coal that fell from the coal trains as they hurtled around the curves.  This was a chore that had to be done before we went to school.  Needless to say, everything was done in that room.  The house had neither electricity nor water.  There was no toilet facility either.  Everyday we had to drag pails of water up the 30 or so rickety wooden steps between the house of our landlady directly across the street to our house.   Her house had three levels.  There were three steps up from the street leading up to a porch and one large room on the first level; two rooms used as bedrooms and a bathroom on the level below that; and on the third level, another room where a roomer lived.  The water we were able to use was available from a spigot on that third level.

For the people in the house where we lived, there was an outhouse much further up the hill, behind and above the house.  To get to it, it was necessary to walk outside and around to the back of the house, then climb some more rickety, wooden steps which led to a rickety wooden platform the size of a door, that spanned a ditch about 3 feet deep.  Every morning before going to school, Joe and I had to take turns emptying the pail that we used as a toilet, traversing the treacherous route to the outhouse.  During the winter with snow and ice everywhere, we often slipped and slid trying to get up to that outhouse with the contents of that pail, which often spilled over onto the ground and sometimes on us as well.

At one point, Mother began to cough and to complain of pains in her chest, probably the result of her having to go out poorly clothed in the cold, harsh West Virginia winters to either seek work or go to work.  There was one Black doctor in town who agreed to see her in exchange for helping his wife in the house.  He examined her and sent her for an x-ray which indicated that she had tuberculosis.  She was told that she could get treatment in a sanitarium in another area of the state, but that she would have to sign us over for care to an orphanage many miles away.   She adamantly refused to consent to this.  We would watch her stand in the open doorway of that room and breathe cold, fresh air deeply into her lungs, affirming all the while, the verse from the Unity School of Christianity's prayer of faith: "God is my health; I can’t be sick.   God is my strength unfailing quick.  God is my all  I know no fear, since God and love and truth are here."   Several months later, the doctor who had diagnosed her with tuberculosis was absolutely astonished that her current lung x-ray showed no sign of tuberculosis whatsoever!  Many years would pass before I would recognize this close up demonstration of determination and faith for what it really was, and begin to appl