Although Charles was a familiar figure to scores of Negroes in New
Orleans, and they had been more or less intimately acquainted with him
for over two years, curiously little can be learned of his habits or
mode of life. Since the perpetration of his terrible series of crimes it
goes without saying that his former friends are inclined to be reticent,
but it is reasonably certain that they have very little to tell. In
regard to himself, Charles was singularly reticent for a Negro. He did
not even indulge in the usual lying about his prowess and his
adventures. This was possibly due to the knowledge that he was wanted
for a couple of murders. The man had sense enough to know that it would
be highly unwise to excite any curiosity about his past.

When Charles first came to New Orleans he worked here and there as a day
laborer. He was employed at different times in a sawmill, on the street
gangs, as a roustabout on the levee, as a helper at the sugar works and
as a coal shoveler in the engine room of the St. Charles Hotel. At each
of the places where he worked he was known as a quiet, rather surly
fellow, who had little to say to anybody, and generally performed his
tasks in morose silence. He managed to convey the impression, however,
of being a man of more than ordinary intelligence.

A Negro named William Butts, who drives a team on the levee and lives on
Washington Street, near Baronne, told a _Times-Democrat_ reporter
yesterday that Charles got a job about a year ago as agent for a
Liberian Immigration Society, which has headquarters at Birmingham, and
was much elated at the prospect of making a living without hard labor.

According to the further investigations of this reporter, Charles was also
agent for Bishop Turner's _Voice of Missions_, the colored missionary
organ of the African Methodist Church, edited by H.M. Turner, of Atlanta,