JAMES WELDON JOHNSON

"A house that had been lively, gay, and, because of the activities of three growing boys, noisy, had become quiet and subdued. So my father and I were thrown together a good deal, and a new relationship: not only as father and son, but as two men. It was at this point I began to distinguish my love for him as a good father and my admiration for him as a good man. I gauged the support he had won from the community by the simple virtues of industry and integrity. I saw the evidence of it wherever I went with him. And I saw the regard in which he was held for the work to which he had given himself. He was the pastor of a very small church made up of very poor people. He showed no ambition to have charge of a larger and richer congregation . He said to me a number of times, 'I am not a preacher by trade.' By which he meant he was not influenced by the emoluments of the office. His spirit of self-sacrifice might be somewhat minimized by the fact that he had acquired a competence, but not wholly discounted. In addition to the work in his little church, he did a sort of general missionary work. He was the only colored minister--I do not know if there was any white one--who was willing or not afraid to go and pray for a dying woman in the quarter for prostitutes in Jacksonville. The women of the quarter called him "Father Johnson" and they knew whenever they sent for him in such cases that he would come. He did not even affect a noticeable clerical appearance. Indeed he was at that time one of the only two preachers I knew who did not seem to believe that a long-tailed black coat was one of the evidences of Christianity..." P.130, ALONG THIS WAY: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JAMES WELDON JOHNSON (1933)