Page:Journal of American Folklore vol. 12.djvu/400

 68 Journal of American Folk-Lore.

" When a man starts to pray, he has a conscience to tell him when and where ; then he has at the same time a conscience to tell him not to go and pray. The first is a good spirit, the last is a bad spirit. Maybe you may be lying in bed at midnight, eating breakfast or dinner, or between meals. The good spirit may say, ' Go in the swamp to pray,' night or day. If you follow the good one, you will receive good ; if the bad one, you will get nothing.

" I have to work out and find the difference between the two spirits. I felt sometimes like obeying the good spirit and sometimes the bad, and I continued to live to obey it better, and was one morning, just at daylight, called out by it into a gully ; and when I got there and sat down, I lost my sight, and I heard a voice at my head saying : ' When a child learns to read it don't forget for seventy-five or eighty years ; write and send your mistress word and give her thanks for teaching your lips to pray, and tell her to get right, if she ain't right ; ' and then there rose a dead head before me, with rotten teeth ; the head seemed all torn up, a terrible sight ; the sight made me sick and blind for three days. A woman in the presence of me said, ' Give me a pipe of tobacco ; ' another one said, ' You don't use tobacco, just use at it ; ' a voice said, ' Go and set you out a tobacco plant, and let it grow to about one and a half feet, and there is a little worm on the plant.' And he showed me the plant, a pretty green plant, and I never saw as pretty a tobacco plant — the worm eats it and lives on it. Methodists live by the power of God, the Baptists live off of grace ; go and tell all the Methodists they are wrong.

" Three days after that I was in the field ploughing, a sunshiny morning ; there came a west wind as a fire and lifted me up, and showed me a ladder from the northwest, that passed right along by me, about two miles from me ; the voice told me to go to it and be baptized. I saw the church, and in it twelve people, and in the pulpit a colored man preaching. I could see half his body ; the twelve people were in front of him, and I saw myself sitting behind him in the pulpit, and by that spirit and that sign I was showed I was called to preach. The end of the ladder at the church was light and bright ; the end away from the church ran up into the sky and was dark ; if it had a been bright I would have seen into heaven.

" I told my experience in April eleven years ago, and was baptized the third Sunday in May. As my experience I told the three deacons and our minister what I had seen and heard. When they carried me to the water I lost my sight again, got into the water about waist deep ; my breath left me ; a voice spoke at my right ear, ' Brother Lockheart, I baptize you.' I was sick all the time from the time I saw the head till I was baptized. Tuesday night, after I was baptized, I fell from my chair dead, and when I fell back a cloud passed over me darker than any black night, and from that I got well ; that night was the best night's rest I ever had.

" Two days after that I was ploughing in the field, turned my mule round and sat on my plough-stock ; a voice spoke in midday, ' What makes me a nigger ? ' The skin and hair shows it ; if you look upon a hill and see two black men standing, you say there stands two niggers ; if you see two white

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