Wives and Husbands
"There was another woman my master owned. Her husband belonged to another white man. My father also belonged to another white man. Both of them would come and stay with their wives at night and go back to work with their masters during the day. My mother had her kin folks who lived down in the country and my mother used to go out and visit them. I had a grandmother way out in the country. My mother used to take me and go out and stay a day or so. She would arrange with mistress and master and go down Saturday and she would take me along and leave her other children with this other woman. Sunday night she would make it back. Sometimes she wouldn't come back until Monday.
"It didn't look like she was any freer after freedom than she was before. She was free all the time she was a slave. They never whipped her. Asa Brown never whipped his niggers.
Letting Out Slaves
"Asa Brown used to rent out his niggers, sometimes. You know, they used to rent them. But he never rented my mother though. He needed her all the time. She was the cook. He needed her all the time and he kept her all the time. He let her go to see grandmother and he let her go to church.
"Sometimes my mother went to the white church and sometimes she went to the colored folks church. When we went to the white folks church, we took and sat down in the back and behaved ourselves and that was all there was to it. When they'd have these here big meetings—revivals or protracted meetings they call them—she'd go to the white and black. They wouldn't have them all at the same time and everybody would have a chance to go to all of them.
"They wouldn't allow the colored to preach and they wouldn't even call on them to pray but he could sing as good as any of them.
"Generally all colored preachers that I knowed of was slaves. The slaves attended the churches all right enough—Methodists and Baptists both white and black. I never heard of the preachers saying anything the white folks did not like.
"The Methodists' church started in the North. There was fourteen or fifteen members that got dissatisfied with the Baptist church and went over to the Methodist church. The trouble was that they weren't satisfied with our Baptism. The Baptists were here before the Methodists were thought of. These here fourteen or fifteen members came out of the North and started the Methodist church going.