A Year in the South (23 page)

When his work took him into the southern section of the city, Lou had a chance to size up the situation of his fellow freedmen. Here was concentrated the bulk of Memphis's black population. Seven hundred or so, mostly women and children, resided in a camp on President's Island that had been established by the army. It was the last one remaining of several “contraband camps” set up around Memphis during the war to care for fugitive slaves. But the majority of the city's freedmen lived in rented rooms or abandoned buildings or shanties in what was now being called South Memphis. Here a true black urban community was in the making, something that did not exist—could not exist—in Memphis in the days of slavery. There were newly founded black churches, led by black ministers. There were black businesses, including stores and restaurants and barber shops. There were black fraternal organizations, such as the Sons of Ham. And there were aspiring black political leaders—men like Joseph Caldwell, a drayman, and John Brown, a barber—who were speaking publicly to the freedmen and any whites who would listen, proclaiming the message that simple freedom was not enough, that the former slaves must have civil rights and even the ballot.
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Memphis's black community glowed with optimism and a sense of expectation in that summer of 1865. These were, for the most part, men and women who had fled the plantations and refused to return, for they were determined that freedom would mean more than just hoeing some planter's cotton for wages and taking orders from an overseer who likely as not still carried the same whip he wielded in the days of slavery. Their numbers were increasing daily, for the city seemed to offer not only protection from the tyranny of the planters and overseers but also opportunity. And yet, as Lou and anyone else who visited South Memphis could see, for most of the freedmen opportunity was proving elusive. Lou was lucky—he had skills beyond agricultural ones, and he had some money. Most of the ex-slaves in Memphis had neither, and they now sat in squalid hovels, many of them ragged and hungry and idle because there were nowhere near enough unskilled jobs in the city to accommodate them. For now they were willing to bide their time in the hope that something would turn up. So much depended on what the state and federal governments would do, on what kind of reconstruction the South was going to have. There were rumors that the plantations would be confiscated, broken up, and distributed to the freedmen so that they could become independent farmers. In the meantime, many spent their days drinking and gambling in the saloons that had sprung up in the South Memphis community. Some turned to begging or prostitution or thievery to make a living.
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Another thing apparent to anyone who walked or rode the streets of Memphis that summer was the fierce resentment of many of the whites toward the freedmen. The Irish immigrants, who competed with the blacks for the available unskilled jobs, were the most openly hostile. In the recent election the Irish had pretty much taken control of the city government, and now the freedmen faced an unfriendly municipal authority. Mayor John Park was an Irishman, as were over half the aldermen and ninety percent of the policemen. The Irish resented not only the burgeoning population of freedmen in the city, but also the black U.S. soldiers stationed at nearby Fort Pickering, who were seen often on the streets.
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Among the many others whose bitterness toward the freed blacks was apparent were the returned rebel soldiers. There were hundreds in the city that summer, many still wearing Confederate uniforms (shorn of brass buttons and military insignia, however, by order of the federal authorities), and a lot of them were as idle as some of the freedmen. They hung around sullenly on the street corners and in the saloons and hotel lounges, too cowed by the presence of the Yankee occupiers to start trouble, but glaring with hostility at every display of black freedom.
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There were others in Memphis, however, who regarded themselves as friends of the blacks. Among these were a small corps of Northern missionaries, many of them women, who had dedicated their lives to the enlightenment of the former slaves. Most had come to the city during the war. They were sponsored by humanitarian organizations such as the American Missionary Association, headquartered in New York, and the Western Freedmen's Aid Commission of Cincinnati. By the summer of 1865 missionaries were operating more than a dozen schools in Memphis where black children and adults were taught the three R's.
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Another who professed good will toward the freedmen had arrived in the city just one day after Lou and Matilda. He was a Union army general named Davis Tillson, who was assigned to head the Memphis office of the newly created Freedmen's Bureau, a federal agency intended to aid the Southern blacks in their transition from slavery to freedom. The Freedmen's Bureau superseded the army offices of freedmen's affairs, such as Captain Walker's, and possessed broad authority in all matters pertaining to the former slaves. General Tillson made it clear from the start that the blacks under his jurisdiction would have protection. “No person shall escape punishment,” he warned, “… who is guilty of wrong or injustice to the Freed people.” Within days of his arrival he called on Mayor Park to discuss the status of the city's blacks. When he learned that under existing Tennessee law no black testimony could be accepted in court, Tillson set up a Freedmen's Bureau court and ordered the city officials to turn over all civil and criminal cases involving blacks.
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These white Northern friends of the black Memphians were well meaning and in many ways admirable men and women, idealistic and progressive. And yet, as Lou surely began to sense during those summer weeks, their vision of the black race and its future was in some ways at odds with that of the blacks themselves. The missionaries, for their part, were patronizing and paternalistic. They viewed the blacks as childlike and heathenish, cursed with barbarous customs and unseemly manners, and badly in need of some lessons in middle-class decorum and self-control. Acquiring these qualities, one of the missionaries wrote, would “fit them to take care of themselves.”
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General Tillson was likewise certain that the freedmen needed guidance. “Their ignorance,” he said, “… makes them insensible to their best interests.” They required the bureau's help in order to understand “what freedom means.” He pronounced them deficient in the virtues of “neatness, thrift and industry,” and he banned the sale of liquor to them. Tillson disapproved especially of the large number of black Memphians who sat idle while planters were clamoring for their labor and offering decent wages. There could be only one explanation, he insisted, for their reluctance to return to the plantations: they were lazy. In August he came to a decision. Unemployed freedmen would be forced to leave the city and find work in the countryside.
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Lou was in no immediate danger of expulsion for he was self-supporting. He was, in fact, making a pretty good living by the standards of black Memphis. Nevertheless, he was restless. Memphis was stifling, and not only because of the summer heat. Here, he was now convinced, his freedom could not be fully realized; and he knew that no other place in the South would offer any better opportunities. He must go north. He was not sure what he would find there, but he sensed that “somehow … it would be better for us.”
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What finally spurred him to move on was a chance encounter with a man who had knowledge of Matilda's mother. Matilda had not seen her since the day in 1855 when they were separated in a Memphis slave market. After gaining freedom, the man said, she had gone to Cincinnati; but that was all he knew. Lou, Matilda, and Mary Ellen talked it over and concluded that even though the chance of finding her was slim, it was worth a try. They would go to Cincinnati.
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Before they left Memphis, they had a gratifying reunion with their soldier friends. The two troopers had come to the city on some business and went out of their way to hunt up Lou. They were glad to learn that he and the others were doing well. Lou could hardly express his gratitude for what the two men had done back in Panola. He regarded them as heroes. Only after they said farewell did he realize that he had never learned their names.
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It was mid-August when Lou and the rest of the family packed up their things, headed down to the wharf, and booked passage on a steamboat to Cincinnati. The boat took them northward up the Mississippi and then, at Cairo, turned northeastward. As they made their way up the Ohio, Lou could look starboard and see the South he was leaving; on the port side was the North, and his future.
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The boat docked in Cincinnati. Lou and the others made their way from the wharf to the heart of the huge city, gazing around in awe and trepidation. It was an overwhelming place, and they were utter strangers on a nearly hopeless quest. The only thing to do was to start asking around. They approached one black person after another, Matilda giving her mother's name and description. Incredibly, one man they questioned said that he knew such a woman, and he gave directions to the house where she boarded. When they reached the place, they knocked on the door, and a moment later Matilda and Mary Ellen were joyfully embracing the mother they had not seen for ten years.
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SAMUEL AGNEW

The early days of summer found Sam Agnew hard at work in his poppy patch, intent and hopeful. The time had come to see if his countless hours of labor in the patch during the winter and spring would be rewarded. For months he had battled weeds, fended off invading livestock, repaired damage from torrential rains, hauled water from the creek during dry spells, and spread swamp mud and cotton seed as fertilizer. Now the plants were flowering, the pink blooms clashing wildly with the green expanses of corn and cotton that surrounded the patch. On the first day of June, Sam counted 164 blooms, and more appeared in the days thereafter. Within each bloom was a hard little green capsule, from which the precious opium had to be drawn.
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Moving down the rows of poppies on his knees, Sam painstakingly scarified each capsule by slicing lightly into it with a blade. He did this almost every evening throughout June, Sundays excepted. In the mornings he would go down the rows again, carefully gathering the gummy opium that had seeped from the cuts overnight. Capsules whose wounds had healed were rescarified until nothing more came forth. “It is a wearisome business,” Sam decided, “tedious and slow.”
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It was also, in the end, a disappointing business. “The yield is small,” Sam admitted, “—smaller than I anticipated.” When the last drop of juice had been wrung from the poppies and dried, his father, Enoch, weighed the entire harvest on his apothecary scales. It came to barely more than an ounce. Sam recorded this tersely in his diary and never mentioned poppies again.
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Besides keeping him tired and sore, his labors among the poppies hindered his news-gathering, for from the patch he could not see the road. Still, by chatting with passers-by whenever he was back at the house, by pumping acquaintances for information when he ran errands off the plantation, and by poring over every newspaper he could get, he picked up a good deal of news and rumor. But neither he nor anybody else in Tippah County really knew what was going on. No less than the last weeks of spring, the first weeks of summer were a time of confusion, uncertainty, and trepidation.
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The threat of famine, for one thing, continued to haunt the county. The Agnews were better off than many: no one on their plantation, white or black, was starving. But the farm animals were on short rations and had been for some time. On June 11 Sam recorded another incident involving the mule Peter, who in May had fallen and thrown him. This time Peter got mired in muck when he stepped into a pond. Too weak to extricate himself, he had to be pulled out. “Pa's mules,” Sam wrote, “are broke down by hard work and nothing to eat.”
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The grain shortage in the community could not be remedied anytime soon. During the spring the Agnews and their neighbors had managed to get some corn from the counties to the south, but those sources were now depleted; one of the neighbors went down in the latter part of June to see what he could buy but returned empty-handed. The Yankee occupation forces were distributing corn to needy people at certain points in northeastern Mississippi—corn from Confederate government depots, captured at war's end—but none was being doled out in Sam's vicinity. With the war over, military restrictions on trade had ended, and more and more wagons could be seen heading north to Tennessee; but getting to La Grange or Memphis, the nearest Tennessee trade centers, meant a very long trek on very bad roads, and the amount of goods that could be hauled back and forth was limited. The winter wheat was ready for harvesting by early June, but none of the farmers had planted many acres in wheat; everybody was counting on the corn crop, which would not ripen until the fall—and which was now stunted and unpromising, hurt by lack of rain. Sam, like others in his community, was quite concerned. “[W]hat we are to do for bread,” he wrote, “is more than I can tell.”
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The political situation, too, was troubling. The county government was still in a state of suspension. Until it could be revived, roads and bridges would go unrepaired, the poor would go unfed, and the robbers and horse thieves who infested the county would go unprosecuted. The fate of the county government depended on the state government, likewise suspended since the war's end. The fate of the state government depended, in turn, on what the federal government would do. And so all eyes turned toward Washington, where the new president was formulating a policy of reconstruction.