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Possibly some one may desire at some time and for some reason to know
something of the author of this book, and therefore he submits the
following short statement:
LINEAGE AND NATIVITY.--His great-grandmother was born on the west coast
of Africa and was brought a slave to Virginia, where his grandmother
was born. Ere his grandmother had reached her maturity of womanhood,
she was sold into Georgia, where his mother was born. While his mother
was still a child, she and her mother were carried to Mobile county,
Ala., by a Mr. Nathan Howard. In this county, on a lonely looking sand
hill amid pine forests, on June 13, 1845, the writer made his advent
into this world. (In this year, 1845, the Baptists of America divided.)
EARLY RECOLLECTIONS.--Stored away in my earliest memories I find: (1)
The songs and family prayers of my step-grandfather, a pure African,
who had not only learned to read his Bible and hymn book, but had also
learned the rudiments of vocal music sufficiently well to teach the
art of singing. (2) The tender and constant attention of an old white
lady (the only white person on the place), who took my hand as she
went out to look after the nests of the domestic fowls and to gather
a dish of ripe fruit. (3) A Baptist church in the forest, where white
and colored people sat together to commune and to wash each other’s
feet. (4) The saintly face and pure life of my grandmother, to whom
white and black went for prayer and for comfort in the times of their
sorrows. (5) A tin-plate containing the alphabet, from which at the
age of 3 years, I learned the English letters. (6) The death of the
old white lady, and the severing from dear grandmother and the old
home. (7) My introduction at the age of 6 years to the family of Nathan
Howard, Jr., where things were not altogether as tender toward me as
at the old home, and where I came more into associations with books
and with life’s sterner facts. The teachers who boarded here at my
new home became my instructors, and so I was soon reading and writing
fairly well. Here, listening to the reading of the Bible, I was drawn
toward it, and began to read it for myself. The gospel story bound me
to it with cords which nothing has been able to break. At the close of
my eighth year I began to seek the Lord by prayer and supplication,
and have, from that time to this, continued my secret devotions and
strivings after truth. My association with Col. James S. Terrel, the
brother of Judge S. H. Terrel, of Clark county, Miss., at the age of
14, as office boy in his law office, gave me a still broader range of
books. I think I can say that the Colonel and I really loved each other.
I am not sure that I know just when I was regenerated, as my childhood
prayers were often attended with refreshing seasons of love and
joy. But my life was too often very un-christian, breaking out into
the wildest rages of bad temper, which was followed by weeping and
remorse. In 1865, however, I reached an experience of grace which
so strengthened me as to fix me on the side of the people of God. I
went at once to reading the scriptures in public and leading prayer
meetings; notwithstanding this, I was not baptized until March, 1866,
by Rev. O. D. Bowen, of Shubuta, Miss. I was ordained in the St. Louis
Street Church, Mobile, December, 1868, by Revs. Charles Leavens and
Philip Gambrell.
I taught school for the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1867--taught various
schools under our public school system. I have been pastor of the
First Colored Baptist Church, Meridian, Miss., Dexter Avenue Church,
Montgomery, and held various State positions. The only time I have
spent at school was spent in Meharry, the medical department of the
Central Tennessee College.