When interviewed about her mother, Elvira Lee, Sarah Emery Merrill was living at 1710 Monon Avenue in New Albany. The fieldworker, Velsie Tyler, provided three texts, one dealing with songs and two with tales. Another field-worker, Iris Cook, provided two nearly identical versions of another text collected from Sarah about her uncle, Lewis Barnett (q.v.).
According to Sarah, Elvira often talked of her experiences as a slave and as a free person in Kentucky. As soon as she was big enough, Elvira’s main job was caring for her master’s children. The slaveholder, whose name was Hall, was a well-educated man who often taught his children their lessons. Elvira studied with the white children and encouraged them to get their father to hear her lessons, too, each night. Consequently, when the white children were old enough to go away to school, Elvira had received a fair education in common school subjects.
Elvira was about sixteen years old when the Civil War began. Some men drilled in a large field belonging to Captain Hall, her owner, before they went into camp. During the war it was often very dangerous for officers to come home and visit their families. On one such visit home, Captain Hall spent most of the night in Elvira’s cabin, for he had received word that soldiers were going to search his home for him. The following morning when Elvira’s father, Ed, was working in the stables, he saw a man sneaking about the grounds and warned Captain Hall, who immediately left, taking Ed with him along a concealed trail along Green River.
On this particular occasion, the slaves soon learned that Captain Hall was visiting home, and all of them gathered around the big house to see him, not knowing that he already had slipped away. Soon soldiers came from every direction and searched the plantation. They questioned all the slaves, but learned nothing from them. They searched everywhere in the big house and the slave cabins; they fired shots into the trees and beat the shrubbery. Finally an officer said, “Old Aunty has told the truth; there’s no man here,” and they went away.
On another visit, Captain Hall was protected by his wife, who told the soldiers that she had a very sick child. When asked what the illness was, she said, “The doctor wasn’t sure, but he thought that it was smallpox”—a disease feared so much by the soldiers that they soon left the plantation.
After the war, Captain Hall gave his slaves an acre of ground for a school and another acre for a church and cemetery. Elvira, one of the first black teachers, taught school in one of the cabins until the new school was built. Prejudice ran so high against the black school, however, that it was burned after a few weeks. Sarah said that the government soon settled the difficulties, and “Mother lived to see the Negroes getting an education as well as the white children.” Elvira later married Edward Lee, who had been a Union soldier, and moved from Hart County, Kentucky, to New Albany, where she died six years before the interview with her daughter. Elvira helped organize one of the first black churches in New Albany and outlived all the other charter members.
Sarah said that her mother had taught her a couple of songs, and to her knowledge neither had ever been written down. Songs of blacks, she said, are different from those of whites. They are songs of experience. As blacks worked in the plantation fields, often for cruel slaveholders, their souls cried to be taken home to heaven or to be given the courage to continue. Sarah said that the “notes of our music are peculiarly shaped because the rhythm is not perfect.” The songs were created “not according to a fixed rule but according to the rhythmical nature of our race.” She said many of the old blacks could neither read nor write, but they knew that the entrance of the “Spirit of God” made a difference in their lives, though they could express it only orally.
Sister Ridley, an aged black woman, always confessed that God had split her open, scraped her just like a hog, and washed out her insides with milk, which killed all her sins. Then God healed her, and she was all pure and white inside. Aunt Reiny Thatcher, another old black woman, who lived to be 119 years old, said that when she had her “experience,” the angels came right out of heaven and taught her the words and tune to the first spiritual. According to Sarah, “She taught it to my mother, who taught it to me. She would say, ‘Oh, Elvira, I saw them angels with these old eyes of mine, and I could hear them just as plain. And old Satan sure did howl when he found he couldn’t have my spirit no more.’” Here is Aunt Reiny Thatcher’s song:
One day, one day,
Old Satan went abroad,
And so my soul flew to God.
Glory be to King Immanuel,
To my King Immanuel,
To my King Immanuel.
Glory be to King Immanuel.
Old Satan went a-howling,
Just like a howling dog.
Glory be to my King Immanuel.
Sarah described the other song as a black woman’s “experience song”:
All around my house was walled with brick,
And in the middle was steel.
King Jesus arose and fought in blood,
And conquered till he fell.
Ah’m gwine to Glory, hallelujah!
Oh, praise ye my Lord,
Ah’m gwine to Glory, hallelujah!
Love and serve the Lord.
Sarah also related a couple of tales that she had learned from her mother. According to one of them,
An old Negro slave on bended knees prayed, “Oh, God, my master’s so mean to me, please take old Ephraim home. Please, Master, take old Ephraim home out of the miseries of this life.” Over and over he prayed his earnest prayer. Some white boys passing by the cabin overheard the plea and thinking they would have some fun knocked on the door. “Who’s there?” the colored man asked.
“It’s the Lord come to take Ephraim home,” called the boys.
“He’s not here, Lord. He’s gone. He’s been gone from home for months,” replied old Uncle Ephraim.
Sarah learned the following tale from her mother, too:
The old Negro slaves prayed that God would punish the mean slave owners, and this colored man’s prayer was:
“Oh, Lord, my master’s so mean to me. Please, Lord, rain down from heaven and kill all the mean white folks.” As he pleaded with his Savior, he was overheard by a group of mischievous white boys who gathered a pile of stones and waited till they thought the old man would be asleep. They all started throwing rocks on the cabin, the roof of which was very poor, and many of them went through.
Again the prayer was heard, “Oh, Lord, please stop raining rocks, for they is doin’ as much bad as good.”