Moses finally located the Negro witness at a small house in the country. Louis Allen was a forty-two-year-old logger with a seventh-grade education. He had a wife and three children; a fourth child had died of what Allen described as epilepsy. During World War II service in New Guinea, he had come down with ulcers, which had made the arduous work of cutting and hauling raw timber difficult ever since, but Allen did better with logs than with farming. Because he lacked capital and access to any of the three Negro lawyers in Mississippi, Allen relied on white men to “fix up the papers” for his
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