In the early 1990s I interviewed Daniel Hairston, then in his 70s, whose
grandmother, enslaved by the White Hairstons in Virginia, was still alive
when Daniel was in his early teens. “Grandma Rose,” born 1830, died in
1937. She told Daniel that the enslaved had to go into the forest to
worship, in fear of the lash. She told him that they carried a large
cauldron used for washing clothes. In Daniel’s words, “When they got ready
to pray, they turned over the pot so the sound would go in it and the white
people wouldn't hear. They turned it bottom up, and they’d get on their
knees when they were singing so the sound would go under it.” (*The
Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White*, by Henry Wiencek, p,
31.) The WPA narratives in *Weevils in the Wheat*, Perdue, include eleven
accounts from different sections of Virginia that mention the use of pots
to deaden sound.

Henry Wiencek

Charlottesville

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