What Love Can Do: Recollected Stories of Slavery and Freedom in New Orleans and the Surrounding Area

Henry Goody Johns was the eldest son of a beautiful young slave girl from East Central Africa and her Louisiana Master. Given the choice by his father to pass for white or to remain a slave, Johns chose to forever identify with his black mother and siblings, later becoming a pastor to his community after the Emancipation Proclamation.

This volume of stories about Henry Goody Johns, who taught his people "What Love Can Do" is oral history at its best. It has been passed down from a generation of an enslaved people who came to learn that prejudice and hatred is a greater form of slavery than bondage itself.

This memoir as written by Arthur Mitchell, a descendent of slaves on the Jons Plantation, has been preserved as closely as possible to its original form.