John Cole

John Cole was enslaved by Henry Hull, a banker in Athens, Georgia. As a young man he handled the difficult horses. When Union troops came to Athens and freedom arrived about six months after Lee's surrender, he found, as his interviewer put it, that he was free but had no way to go anywhere. He stayed and worked for the Hull family for twenty years without pay.

In his youth he had no patience for signs and sayings: if your foot itched, put something on it, and nobody knew what a howling hound was up to at night. But in old age he came to believe in things he said had been proved: a screech owl's cry and a cow lowing in the afternoon meant death was close, and when death came to a house, the clock should be stopped and the mirrors covered. He credited his long life to giving up smoking and drinking, though he gladly accepted a nickel cigar from the interviewer. "In the morning time one lives," he said, "but death always comes in the afternoon."