<TITLE>08. Par 26-29</TITLE>L-26  When I was borned, I weighed five pounds, little bitty boy. And I haven't growed very much since. But then my mother, she carried me around on a pillow. I was borned in a little log cabin, way in the mountains of Kentucky, Cumberland County, near a little creek called Renox. There's only one way you get through there, that's you go through the creek. That's the only way to go is by the creek. It's a little isolated place, way down near the Tennessee line on the Cumberland River.
My father was a logger. My mother, her father was a school teacher, and the principal of the rural school. Didn't get to go to school very much in Kentucky, you know, the creek could get up; you couldn't go. In the summertime they had to take a gooseneck hoe and chop out the corn, tobacco, and stuff that they raised in the hills, make a living.
I was down, standing by the little old cabin, not long ago, and took a picture of it. I think it appeared in my book: a little old two room cabin. The porch... The end of the kitchen had fallen down. I looked at it. I could imagine seeing my mother there. My dad was just a young man, mother, only fifteen years old when I was born. A little mountain children... And my dad worked hard all of his life. He died young: fifty-two. I'm thankful that mother's still living today, could be here with me.

L-27  All my life, I guess I was a misunderstood person; no one understood me. When I was a little boy, I could... Just as I can barely remember... My mother knows behind that, how the Angel of the Lord came to the room. And I--I do not know... I know this, I mean, that it was not goodness of my father and mother; they were both sinners. Never was no merits of my own, it was a merits of Jesus Christ.
Our family... Later on, we... Poor, oh, my, I'm just almost ashamed to tell you, that I--how poor that we had to live.

L-28  I was setting... And I was misunderstood so much till when I'd be talking on the street to someone, somebody else would come up, well, they'd walk away and leave me stand. And I love people, but no one had nothing to do with me. I was what they called the black sheep. I'd go downtown when I was a little boy... School, they had nothing to do with me. I wouldn't smoke and things with the rest of them, so they had nothing to do with me. When I was a... become aged to go out with girls, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old, why, because I didn't go to dances, and parties, and things like that, I was a wallflower. So they had nothing to do with me.
When I become a minister in the Missionary Baptist Church, I was a fanatic. So God finally got me to the place where He was bringing me to (You see?), to the people of His call.

L-29  And I was setting not long ago on the porch. I'd just come in from a meeting. I was so tired I couldn't hardly go. My, I was so tired. I just got most of the crowd away from the house. I set down on the porch, and my poor old wife, she was just thirty years old but turning gray. I put my arm around her and set out on porch, and we was rocking a little bit. She said, "Are you tired, honey?"
And I said, "So tired I can hardly stand up." Just then a car drove up. It was my piano player from over at the Tabernacle. She seen me setting there, and she got... She run up to the porch and just started crying, laid something in my lap and run away. She said, "I--I won't take your time. You--you rest while you got this minute. I won't..." And she run away. And I picked it up. I looked at it. There was a little picture on there. I looked up. I seen some big old sand cranes. We have them in Indiana; I don't know whether you have them here or not. They was down at the ponds all day, feeding. The sun was going down in the west. I looked over here and had that poem,
 Sunset and evening star
 And one clear call for me.
 May there be no mourning at the bar,
 When I put out to sea.


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