Times were tough growing up on the Mississippi but, 'I wouldn't trade it for nothin' '

He's 91, she's 92, and on Nov. 8 they'll celebrate 67 years since they eloped. (Wow.) "Wow is right!" Annie answers with laugh nearly as big as she is. "But I hope to make it 100!"

A hundred years of marriage? Is that really a good idea?

The query stops Jesse midstep. He drops to a living room chair, studying his wife.

"Yes," he nods slowly. "Yes, I think it would be."

She smiles coyly, then gets officious: "Now, that's Annie Y. McDaniel. That Y is for Young."

"She had to get that in there!" he says with a smile.

Annie, he knows, likes to keep things moving. After all, she grew up on the move, living in tents and on houseboats from Natchez to Memphis and on up to Dyersburg, Tenn., depending on the mood of Mother Nature.

Come Sunday at 1 and 3 p.m., you'll find her at the Memphis Music ∓mp; Heritage Festival put on by the Center for Southern Folklore, telling her stories of growing up on the Mississippi.

"I was born Feb. 22, 1914, near Vicksburg, Miss., out on the river," says Annie, green eyes flashing, hands pointing or punctuating or simply floating through the air as she speaks.

"Mama, I think, was 15 and Papa was 19 when they married -- 1906 at Natchez -- and they had 10 children. Papa -- he was part Cherokee Indian -- got his arm shot off in a deer hunting accident in 1909. Back then, if you had a handicap at all, you couldn't get a job.

"So Papa become a trapper, hunter and a fisherman, and we moved out on the river to be close to his work."

Husband Jesse is the good sport who totes Annie's props and takes care of "back-stage" details on her storytelling outings.

An Arkansas farm boy by birth, ice salesman by default and TV repairman by trade, Jesse likes to hunt and fish, and can make or fix most anything.

He still builds furniture of wood and works semiprecious stones for jewelry. "I LOVE big rings," says Annie, and she's got a boxful by Jesse: Rose quartz, moonstone, tiger eye and deep blue lapis lazuli.

On Annie's storytelling days for Southern Folklore or for Arts in the Schools,

Jesse does as directed. Often he exhibits items for the show and tell -- such as the tent model he made of her childhood home.

"Papa," she explains, "would raise the tent and he would dig a ditch around it and throw dirt up on the edge of that tent to seal that, to keep the wind from coming under. Course, lot of times it blowed up. But he kept that in the winter time all covered up so we'd be warm."

Warm for a tent, that is. But back then, even a house like Jesse's on the farm in Forrest City was far from cushy. His dad would get up first to start the fire, but it didn't warm the bedrooms. "That's where your feather beds come in," he explains. "Sink down in that...."

Breaking the skim of ice on the water bucket of a morning is something they both recall.

"It was a hard life, yes," says Annie. "But I can look back and I wouldn't trade it for nothin'."

How hard was it on the river?

"Well, you grew up without anything. Ab-so-lute-ly nothin'," she says. "Course, you had plenty to eat, and now we always went to the circus, and if we lived close to town, we'd go to the movie ever' week.

"On the river you swam any time you wanted to. I could swim by the time I could walk almost. ... And you swung on great vines and you climbed trees. You could play cowboys and Indians and pirates. There was no dull moments.

"Course, you had to work. We had to get driftwood for Mama to cook with, and we had to haul water from the river for her to wash with. We had to help her wash with the rub board. It was not bad."

"That's now," Jesse softly inserts. "You think that now" -- nestled in their modern house, not far from their three grown daughters and their families.

Annie moves on undeterred: "I tell you, we had a lot of love."

Often as not, Annie's maternal grandparents joined the family on the Mississippi, as Grandpa was no stranger to the river's ways.

He was a doctor of sorts: At least he was studying with a doctor up north when he shot a man. "He thought it was self-defense," says Annie, "but really he was just mad."

A young man then, Grandpa fled by boat, down the Ohio to the Mississippi, and south. He landed in Greenville and there opened an office. Grandma -- "a school teacher out of the hills of Kentucky" -- followed by train with their two sons and a daughter (Annie's mom).

Annie, however, knew little but river life until the her folks, Lillie and W.D. Young, moved to land during the flood of '32. "It was about 1937" -- another flood -- "before we went off the river and never went back.

"When we lived close to a city, we went to school in town. But when we didn't ... Grandma took us out on a sandbar and taught us to read and to write on the sand. She'd give us a stick and make us write our ABC's, our numbers. (That's how) Grandpa taught us to draw. And Grandpa taught me 'Jack and Jill.' "

"We lived," Annie says, "at the foot of Illinois Street (in Memphis) on a big houseboat, and Papa had a fish dock there.

"At this time, I was going to Riverside School. But the kids wouldn't play with me. Their mothers wouldn't let 'em. They called me a river rat. And when they call me a river rat, that's like saying sic 'im to a dog. That's why I knew my principal better than my teacher!"

But she diverges.

"During the lunch period, they'd ring a bell five minutes early, and you lined up, and if you was real quiet, they'd get a student to sing a song or recite or tap dance. Everybody would just applaud them.

"I thought I'd like some of that applause. And I told the teacher, 'I'd like to say a poem today.' She said, 'What are you going to recite?' I said, 'Jack and Jill.' So I got up there ...

Jack and Jill had a still / up in Hatchie Bottoms. / Somebody strode in, / went 'n' told, / and the law went up 'n' got 'em.'

"Well, I was so proud of me, you know. No applause. I waited. And waited. And that teacher said, 'Annie Young, the principal wants to see you.'

"I guess I was in the second grade, about 7 or 8. Principal told Mama what I'd done ... I was crying. And Mama said, 'Annie, where did you hear anything like that?' I said, 'Grandpa taught me.'

"She said, "Don't you EVER repeat anything your granddaddy tells you unless you clear it with me first.' "

Jesse McDaniel knew nearly nothing about the early life and times of Annie Young before they wed Nov. 8, 1939. And she little more about him.

She knew Jesse liked to hunt and fish and go boating, but at heart he's a landlubber who loves to garden and stay put.

It was the Depression when he left the farm to work at his brother's restaurant at South Third and Peebles. "Just a little hole-in-the-wall," he says.

Then he got on with Railway Ice Co. "They would bring the boxcars in, put the ice in the end ... then your vegetables, fruit, stuff like that, to stay cool." He moved from the warehouse to the small ice store on South Third. "That's where I met her. They lived right behind, on Dempster."

Annie remembers it differently: "He had a date with my sister, and she was beautiful."

"No she wasn't!" he retorts.

He made the date, he says, but never picked her up.

Annie says he came by, but younger sister Alda had left with an old boyfriend. So, Jesse asked Annie to go for a drive in his 1934 Ford.

"Of course, we ended up with a barbecue," Annie continues, "and he took me home and said, 'Well, do you have a regular boyfriend?' I was between dates. Course, I was an old maid, nearly 26.

"We'd just started dating, and he wanted to know how old I was. I said, 'How old do you think?' He said, 'Nineteen?'

"I said, 'Somebody told you.'

"He said, 'No, they didn't. I just figured.'

"When we went to get the marriage license is when he found out: 'You told me you was 19!'

'No, you told me I was 19.'"

And they laugh in unison.

"We got along good," Jesse explains, "and I loved her. Well, I grew to love her, let's put it that way.

"And we're still in love."