“IN TRAVELING FROM THIS WORLD TO THE NEXT, THE ROAD IS NO WIDER FOR THE PRINCE, THAN THE PEASANT.”—Sancho Panza.
In that period of our country’s history known as “slave time,” the white people encouraged the colored race to serve God, and received its converts into their own churches, and worshipped with them.
In most of the meeting houses, there were galleries, or separate apartments, in which the colored members sat, and listened to the Gospel preached by white ministers.
Their membership was received into the Baptist Associations, on equal terms, and the colored ministers often preached during the several days sessions of these assemblies. Elder Horace Carr did, when the Association was held at Red River Church.
Speaking of the separate apartments in the churches, the writer has a vivid recollection of the orderly colored congregation that occupied the upper gallery of old Harmony Church, three miles south of Port Royal, in Robertson county.
Near the front, could be seen such devout Christians as old Uncle Allen Northington, Aunt Sydney Norfleet, Aunt Sylvia Carney, Aunt Lucy Parks, Aunt Becky Northington, Aunt Cely Northington, etc. It was a rare occurrence that a colored child was seen at church, but you would notice numerous white children sitting in the laps of their good old “Black Mammys” as they called them. But while this Christian brotherhood was being enjoyed, another day was dawning, in which a new order of things was to take place. The primitive order, with its picturesque types, was doomed to pass away. The broad plantation of the old Southern planter was to undergo material changes, and every influence for good was becoming more and more in unison with the great master chord of Christianity.
Surely the hand of Divinity was in it all, or it would not have been so.
The Civil War came on, and the Institution of Slavery was abolished.
It was not only Aunt Kitty Carr, Uncle Granville Wimberly, and a few others, that were referred to as “free born,” but all were free!
