John Cooper—a seventy-six-year-old family man, member of the Baptist Church, and “good citizen”—was residing at 501 East 2nd Street in Muncie when he was interviewed about his father, Woodford Monroe, who was free-born on the Monroe plantation in Butler County, Kentucky. Woodford married Sarah Phant, also freeborn but on the Cooper plantation. John inherited the name of his mother’s owner rather than that of his father’s owner because after his father married and arrived on the Cooper plantation, he was called Woodford Cooper. According to John, Woodford’s master was kind to his workers and wanted them to be free. He paid them wages and gave them food from the plantation. John knew very little about his grandfather, who was a slave, for his grandfather had been sold and separated from his family.
Since Woodford was free, he was drafted into the Union Army, though he never served because the war ended before he left the plantation. After the war John moved with his family to Evansville, where his parents died and he was forced to face the world alone. Walking part of the way, John went to Anderson and worked there for a time before moving to Muncie in 1902.
Though born free, John grew up in an atmosphere of slavery and said he had to take out legal papers in order to vote. The fieldworker wrote that the “incidents of the past come to his mind more like a legend, with its lights and shadows, than the drama of a human reality” and attempted to record John’s narrative “in his own idiom as near as we could gather it from his mental and verbal inflections”:
We is livin’ in Evansville after I left the South. I got religion—come this here way: Our peoples was holdin’ a big meetin’ there. I go. One night the parson, he get he eye on me. He preach as if I had salvation. I answer him no, an’ say on that I dont care to have it roun’ ’cause it make one fool out of this free nigger. He ask then did I chance hide ’lone in Evansville. I say, lordy, Parson, worse’n that, I is a orphan an’ ’lone in this world. Then he say, “Come, brother, the Lord am searchin’ for the orphan an the shorn lamb.”
There be a big lot of we’s people at the altar an’ makin’ a big hallelujah noise. I hadn’t more than hit the bench when the Lord says, says he, “Come in, John, I’m waitin’.”
It was winter, then, an the river was floatin’ with ice. The parson, he announce all that got religion come down to the river next Lord’s day at ten o’clock. The whole congregations was there, an the train, it fetched a big load of lookers. Some colored brothers hefted some big chunks of ice out and make a hole at the edge of the water. Parson took us all in an chuck us under. Then we was loaded in a truck an took home. The clothes, they freeze on our body, but we-uns all shout glory, hallelujah, we be chilluns of God. Every sin done be washed ’tirely ’way.
I ain’t never been nowhere only in the flock of the Lord since.