"I can remember how my mother used to pray out in the field. We'd be
picking cotton. She would go off out there in the ditch a little ways.
It wouldn't be far, and I would listen to her. She would say to me:
'Pray, son,' and I would say, 'Mother, I don't know how to pray,' and
she would say, 'Well, just say Lord have mercy.' That gave me religious
inclinations. I cultivated religion from that time on. I would try to
pray and finally I learned. One day I was out in the field and it was
pouring down rain, and I was standing up with tears in my eyes trying to
pray as she taught me to. We weren't picking cotton then. I was just
walking out. My mother was dead. I would be walking out and whenever I
would get the notion I would stop right there and go to praying.
"In slave times, they would have a prayer meeting out in some of the
places and they would turn a pot down out in front of the door. It would
be on a stick or something and raised up a short distance from the
ground so that it wouldn't set flat on the ground. It seems that that
would catch the sound and keep it right around there. They would sing
that old song:
'We will camp awhile in the wilderness
And then I'm going home.'