The first zoo I saw was at Knoxville, Tennessee, and they had a big bull elephant there. That was the first zoo I saw in my life, and had some other animals too and had a very famous old African bull. I had a very tolerant mother, I would bring possums, raccoons, and screech owls and hawks and crows in the house, we had all kinds of animals. I had a squirrel that was a gray squirrel that every time my grandmother came to her house down to see us, that gray squirrel hated my grandmother. She wore the old cotton stockings, and they were all picked stringy because that squirrel was grabbing those. She had a broom and she was going after that squirrel. She carried a broom with her every time she came to the house because that squirrel didn’t like her. And my mother had a thing about snakes.
