Full Text of the Excerpt

Tell me what you did on your trip to Chicago to the convention. Do you remember what year that was?

CONSTANCE MYERS:

No. That's the disgraceful story. He told me I couldn't go. That's all you had to do was tell me I couldn't do it. I didn't have the clothes to go with Annie. My sister was visiting me from Boston and she had beautiful clothes. She was just my size.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Was this Annie?

EULALIE SALLEY:

Uh huh, Annie Wright was from Augusta. Mattie was my sister, Mrs. Hall.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Annie Wright of Augusta?

EULALIE SALLEY:

Annie Wright wanted me to go with her. Said, "If you go and you meet Mrs. Catt and Maude Wood Park and Anna Howard Shaw and all of those wonderful women, you'll be inspired and you'll come back home and you'll help with this organization. We'll go places. I want you to go." I said, "Annie, I don't have the clothes and I don't have the money." She said, "There'll be a way, and now you put your mind to it." So I put what little mind I had to it and I decided to borrow my sister's clothes. Then I wondered how I'd get that money. This is disgraceful. I'm convicting myself of murder and thievery. I got up early every morning. He Mr. Salley always carried a lot of money in his pocketbook. I salved my conscience by saying, whatever is his is mine and he said when he married me that a third of his he endowed me with. So, I'm entitled to a third. So every morning early I'd get up ahead of him and I'd take a certain amount out of his pocketbook, (he never missed it,) until I got enough to go to Chicago. I called up Annie and I said, "I've got the money. I've got the clothes. Annie, we can go." So we went. It was just a revelation to see the difference between the little women I had known and those big women. It just inspired me.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Where did you stay and how long was the convention?

EULALIE SALLEY:

We stayed three or four days. I don't know where we stayed. The rest of it is very vague.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Do you not remember the events of the convention, the speeches that you heard?

EULALIE SALLEY:

It was a national suffrage convention.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

What year, do you remember that?

EULALIE SALLEY:

That's why I want to get at my diary. It will tell you the exact year and date. But I don't remember. It's been at least seventy-five years. That's a long time to remember.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Yes, but it did inspire you further in the cause?

EULALIE SALLEY:

Yes, it just fired me to go ahead in that cause.