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look after you. Jes you obey Him an don’t you worry!”
Introducing his companion, he assures his audience that this
is “a splendid speaker,” and he listens eagerly to the other’s
halting, practiced: “Ah didn’t expect to be called on to speak
yeah this even”; and interpolates quick bright “Amen”s, “Yes,
He will”s, and “Bless His Name”s during the exhortation that
followed.
That night they are not attacked or molested.
But at a gathering of Negroes on a later night I see the same
brisk strange little man standing unnoticed by himself at one
side of the hall, and I go to him and assure him of my sym
pathy and tell him that I was present the night he was
attacked. He passes over that hastily; it was nothing; he has
had many such experiences; but when I ask him about himself
he answers my questions obligingly, though with some diffi
dence. He knows nothing of his parents except that before
the emancipation one or both were slaves; he has been taught
scarcely anything; and has done hard work all his life. In his
youth he joined a church and began to preach, but having come
soon afterward to see the quality of churches and to be aware
of his “mission,” he travelled “north” and began to go about
working and preaching. He belongs to no church and dis
approves of all alike. He has no property, permitting himself
nothing but poverty and labour. Already he is looked down
upon as improvident by those who know him. His wife has
left him, not relishing her lot with him, for they were forced
always to lodge in the poorest parts of the towns they visited.
The intolerance and hate of white Americans for Negro people
made their lives harder than they would otherwise have been.
Single rooms near small independent “missions houses,” if there
were any that suited, were their temporary homes; and from
one such the wife went at last to visit at the town of Nashville
in the distant state of Tennessee, and she has not come back.
Her intention to do so was vague at her departure. Her hus
band has suffered a great deal through her desertion and has
humbly and pitifully begged her by letter to return, but he has
born her failure to do so and goes on with his work. He is not
loved, nor even much liked by anyone, I find later; he and his
preaching, his high standards, his belief, his self-reliance and