both the same

The Old Plantation

Dark and stormy may come the weather;
I join this he-male and this she-male together.
Let none but Him that makes the thunder,
Put this he-male and she-male asunder.
I therefore pronounce you both the same.
Be good, go along, and keep up your name.
The broomstick's jumped, the world's not wide.
She's now your own. Salute your bride!

"Slave Marriage Ceremony Supplement" from Crossing the Danger Water: Three Hundred Years of African-American Writing, which I pulled off the shelf this morning when I learned the historian John Hope Williams, author of From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, had passed.