In 1998, I wrote this. The voting experience was not mine, but I wrote somebody else’s.

In that year, 1998, I wrote the history of the town where I grew up, and I tried to interview all sorts of people. Talk about diversity! All across the town for a long time just to get experiences. And this is one that someone told me about his first voting experience. Once we had registered at the courthouse to vote, we had to make sure we would be allowed to cast a ballot when the time came, we got a copy of the United States Constitution and every day we read and talked about it on our lunch hour.

He and some other people from our community went to work for what we call the bomb blast up in Aiken County. It was the Savannah River project. And when they met these people from up north, who had come down here to work for the Savannah River project, they the northern people tried to raise the consciousness of the local people and help them understand they didn’t have to live the way black folks had been living in South Carolina.

So, these people had encouraged them to register to vote down. The voting was coming around and we decided we try to fool them. The poll workers. I went to Walter Walterboro and bought me the best suit in the world, and I put that on and went up there to the town hall to vote. People saw me and said, He must be a stranger in town.

I went in and the poll worker said, Before you can vote, I have to be you can read, you’ve got to read the Constitution. I said, No, I don’t. I’m a citizen and I’m registered and I’m voting. And so I voted. Then I went back and told the rest of them, I’ll never forget that day. I live to be 100 years old.