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