“Master said, ’Henry, I thought I told you to feed them horses.  Henry was so taken aback that he couldn’t say a thing.  Henry was my father, you know.  Master went and got his cowhide.  He said, ’Are you going to obey my orders?’ About the time he said that, he hit my father twice with the cowhide, and my father said, ‘Oh pray, master, oh pray,’ and he let him go.  He beat the other fellow pretty bad because he told him to ‘Le’s get the boots first.’

“Old master would get drunk sometimes and get on the niggers and beat them up.  He would have them stark naked and would be beating them.  Then old missis would come right out there and stop him.  She would say, ’I didn’t come all the way here from North Carolina to have my niggers beat up for nothin’.’  She’d take hold of the cowhide, and he would have to quit.  My father had both her picture and the old man’s.

Prayer

“I can remember how my mother used to pray out in the field.  We’d be picking cotton.  She would go off out there in the ditch a little ways.  It wouldn’t be far, and I would listen to her.  She would say to me:  ‘Pray, son,’ and I would say, ‘Mother, I don’t know how to pray,’ and she would say, ‘Well, just say Lord have mercy.’  That gave me religious inclinations.  I cultivated religion from that time on.  I would try to pray and finally I learned.  One day I was out in the field and it was pouring down rain, and I was standing up with tears in my eyes trying to pray as she taught me to.  We weren’t picking cotton then.  I was just walking out.  My mother was dead.  I would be walking out and whenever I would get the notion I would stop right there and go to praying.

“In slave times, they would have a prayer meeting out in some of the places and they would turn a pot down out in front of the door.  It would be on a stick or something and raised up a short distance from the ground so that it wouldn’t set flat on the ground.  It seems that that would catch the sound and keep it right around there.  They would sing that old song: 

  ’We will camp awhile in the wilderness
   And then I’m going home.’

I don’t know any more of the words of that song.

Early Schooling

“I started to school when I was about six or seven years old.  I didn’t get to school regular because my father had plenty of work and he had a habit of taking me out to help him when he needed me in his work.

“My first teacher was a white man named Jones.  I don’t remember his first name.  He was a northerner and a Republican.  He taught in the public school with us.  His boy, John, and his girl, Louisa, went to the same school, and were in classes with us.  The kids would beat them up sometimes but he didn’t cut up about it.  He was pretty good man.

“After him, I had a colored man named M.E.  Davis as a teacher.  He would say to my father, ’Henry, that is a bright boy; he will be a credit to you if you will keep him at school and give him a chance.  Don’t make him lose so much time.’  My father would say, ‘Yes, that is right.’  But as soon as another job came up, he would keep me out again.