Read Been in the Storm So Long Online
Authors: Leon F. Litwack
Been in the Storm So Long (47 page)
With no white person within five miles, the Allstons waited. While strolling about the plantation, they found themselves again surrounded by a shouting “mob of men, women, and children,” some of them dancing, some singing. To the two white women, the scene took on an eerie and unreal dimension.
They sang sometimes in unison, sometimes in parts, strange words which we did not understand, followed by a much-repeated chorus:
“I free, I free!
I free as a frog!
I free till I fool!
Glory Alleluia!”
They revolved around us, holding out their skirts and dancing—now with slow, swinging movements, now with rapid jig-motions, but always with weird chant and wild gestures.
The Allston carriage driver returned alone, unable to locate the mistress’s son. “It was a great relief to me,” Elizabeth recalled, “for though I have been often laughed at for the opinion, I hold that there is a certain kind of chivalry in the negroes—they wanted blood, they wanted to kill some one, but they couldn’t make up their minds to kill two defenseless ladies; but if Charley had been found and brought, I firmly believe it would have kindled the flame.” Now determined to wait for the Union Army officers, the two women tried to ignore the “blasphemous mutterings and threats” they heard around them as they paced the plantation grounds. Finally, word reached the plantation that the officers could not be located but that the driver and one other black (perhaps to look after him) had gone to Georgetown to seek assistance.
Exhausted by the long ordeal, the two Allston women slept that night in their nearby Plantersville home, “which had no lock of any kind on the door.” Early the next morning, a knock at the door awakened them. Before they could reach the hallway, the door opened and a black hand held out the keys to Guendalos. “No word was spoken—it was Jacob,” Elizabeth Allston recalled; “he gave them in silence, and mamma received them with the same solemnity. The bloodless battle had been won.”
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To the Allstons, as to Thomas Pinckney and others, the battles they waged and won to reclaim their lands could easily be viewed as a struggle
of wills in which the character and superiority of white men and women inevitably prevailed. But to the blacks, the defeats they sustained resulted not from a failure of will but from the readiness of Federal authorities to back up the legal claims of whites to their land. Nevertheless, even if planters remained certain of their land titles, they came to fear the turbulence which so often marked the efforts to reestablish a semblance of authority over their former slaves. The range of receptions accorded white families returning to their homes after the war suggests only one dimension in the unraveling of the complex relationships that had made up the “peculiar institution.” On most plantations and farms, the whites had remained, along with their slaves, and the issue at the moment of freedom was not so much who owned the land and the crops but on whose land the newly freed slaves would continue to plant and harvest the crops.
W
HERE THE MASTER
assembled the blacks to tell them they were no longer his slaves, the reactions he provoked gave rise to the legendary stories of a “Day of Jubilo,” in which crowds of ecstatically happy blacks shouted, sang, and danced their way into freedom. Large numbers of former slaves recalled no such celebration. Although not entirely myth, the notion of a Jubilee, with its suggestion of unrestrained, unthinking black hilarity, tends to neglect if not demean the wide range and depth of black responses to emancipation, including the trauma and fears the master’s announcement produced on some plantations. The very nature of the bondage they had endured, the myriad of experiences to which they had been exposed, the quality of the ties that had bound them to their “white folks,” and the ambivalence which had suffused those relationships were all bound to make for a diverse and complex reaction on the day the slaves were told they no longer had any masters or mistresses.
Capturing nearly the full range of responses, a former South Carolina slave recalled that on his plantation “some were sorry, some hurt, but a few were silent and glad.” From the perspective of the mistress of a Florida household, “some of the men cried, some spoke regretfully, [and] only two looked surly and had nothing to say.” Although celebrations seldom followed the master’s announcement, numerous blacks recalled taking the rest of the day off, if only to think through the implications of what they had been told. Still others, like Harriett Robinson, remembered that before the master could even finish his remarks, “over half them niggers was gone.” But the slaves on an Alabama plantation stood quietly, stunned by the news. “We didn’ hardly know what he means,” Jenny Proctor recalled. “We jes’ sort of huddle ’round together like scared rabbits, but after we knowed what he mean, didn’ many of us go, ’cause we didn’ know where to of went.” None of them knew what to expect from freedom and they
interpreted it in many different ways, explained James Lucas, a former slave of Jefferson Davis, who achieved his freedom at the age of thirty-one.
Dey all had diffe’nt ways o’ thinkin’ ’bout it. Mos’ly though dey was jus’ lak me, dey didn’ know jus’ zackly what it meant. It was jus’ somp’n dat de white folks an’ slaves all de time talk ’bout. Dat’s all. Folks dat ain’ never been free don’ rightly know de
feel
of bein’ free. Dey don’ know de meanin’ of it. Slaves like us, what was owned by quality-folks, was sati’fìed an’ didn’ sing none of dem freedom songs.
How long that sensation of shock or incredulity lasted would vary from slave to slave. “The day we was set free,” remembered Silas Shotfore, “us did not know what to do. Our Missus said we could stay on the place.” But his father made one decision almost instantly: no matter what they decided to do, they would do it somewhere else.
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Suspicious as they might be of the white man’s pronouncements, some blacks were initially skeptical, thinking it might all be a ruse, still another piece of deception calculated to test their fidelity. With that in mind, some thought it best to feign remorse at the announcement, while others needed to determine the master’s veracity and sought confirmation elsewhere, often in the nearest town, at the local office of the Freedmen’s Bureau, or on another plantation. When his master explained to him that he was now a free man, Tom Robinson refused to believe him (“ ‘You’re jokin’ me,’ I says”) until he spoke with some slave neighbors. “I wanted to find out if they was free too. I just couldn’t take it all in. I couldn’t believe we was all free alike.”
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Although most slaves welcomed freedom with varying degrees of enthusiasm, the sense of confusion and uncertainty that prevailed in many quarters was not easily dispelled. The first thought of sixteen-year-old Sallie Crane of Arkansas was that she had been sold, and her mistress’s reassurance that she would soon be reunited with her mother did little to comfort her. “I cried because I thought they was carrying me to see my mother before they would send me to be sold in Louisiana.” The impression deliberately cultivated by some masters that the Yankees intended to sell freed slaves to Cuba to help defray war costs may have had some impact. No matter what they were told, a former North Carolina slave recalled of the master’s announcement, he and his mother were simply too frightened to leave the premises. “Jes like tarpins or turtles after ’mancipation. Jes stick our heads out to see how the land lay.”
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Nor did some slaves necessarily welcome the news when they fully understood its implications for their own lives. The sorrow which some displayed was not always pretense. To those who were reasonably satisfied with their positions and the relations they enjoyed with the white family, freedom offered no immediate cause for rejoicing. “I was a-farin’ pretty well in de kitchen,” Aleck Trimble remarked. “I didn’ t’ink I eber see better times dan what dem was, and I ain’t.” That was how Mollie Tillman also
recalled the advent of freedom, since, as she boasted, “I warn’t no common eve’yday slave,” and her mistress refused to let her work in the fields. “I wuz happy den, but since ’mancipation I has jes’ had to scuffle an’ work an’ do de bes’ I kin.” To Moses Lyles, a former South Carolina slave, emancipation undermined the mutual dependency upon which slavery had rested and neither class benefited from the severance of those ties. “De nigger was de right arm of de buckra class. De buckra was de horn of plenty for de nigger. Both suffer in consequence of freedom.”
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Standing on the porch of the Big House and watching her fellow slaves celebrate their emancipation, Sara Brown wondered why they thought the event worthy of such festivities. “I been free all de time,” she thought. This insistence that they were already as free as they wanted to be repeated an old article of faith which some slaves had recited almost habitually in antebellum days when northern visitors pressed them on the subject of slavery. Disillusionment and “hard times” in the post-emancipation period helped to keep this perception of slavery alive. But for certain ex-slaves, the attachments went much deeper, and neither “good times” nor a bountiful freedom would most likely have altered the relationships and position they had come to cherish. To some of the strong-willed “mammies,” whose dominance in the white household was seldom questioned and whose pride and self-respect remained undiminished, emancipation threatened to disrupt the only world and the only ties that really mattered to them and they clung all the more stubbornly to the past. Even death would not undo such relationships, as some of them anticipated a reunion in an all-white heaven.
Who says I’se free? I warn’t neber no slabe. I libed wid qual’ty an’ was one ob de fambly. Take dis bandanna off? No, ‘deedy! dats the las’ semblance I’se got ob de good ole times. S’pose I
is
brack, I cyan’t he’p it. If mah mammy and pappy chose for me ter be brack, I ain’t gwine ter be lak some white folks I knows an’ blame de Lord for all de ’flictions dat comes ’pon ’em. I’se put up wid dis brackness now, ’cordin’ to ol’ Mis’s Bible, for nigh on ter ninety years, an’ t’ank de good Lord, dat eberlastin’ day is mos’ come when I’ll be white as Mis’ Chloe for
eber mo’!
[Her mistress had died some years before.] What’s dat, honey? How I knows I’se gwine ter be white? Why, honey, I’se s’prised! Do you s’pose ’cause Mammy’s face is brack, her soul is brack too? Whar’s yo’ larnin’ gone to?
Many of the freed slaves who viewed emancipation apprehensively readily confessed that they had escaped the worst aspects of bondage. “I ain’t never had no mother ’ceptin’ only Mis’ Patsey,” a Florida freedwoman remarked, “an’ I ain’t never felt lak’ a bond slave what’s been pressed—dat’s what dem soldiers say we all is.”
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The mixed emotions with which slaves greeted their freedom also reflected a natural fear of the unknown, along with the knowledge that “they’s alius ’pend on Old Marse to look after them.” For many blacks, this
was the only life they had known and the world ended at the boundaries of the plantation. To think that they no longer had a master or mistress, while it brought exuberance and relief to many, struck others with dismay. “Whar we gwine eat an’ sleep?” they demanded to know. And realizing they could not depend on the law or on other whites for protection, who would now stand between them and the dreaded patrollers and “po’ buckra”? After hearing of their freedom, Silas Smith recalled, “de awfulest feeling” pervaded the slave quarters that night as they contemplated a future without masters or mistresses. “You felt jes’ like you had done strayed off a-fishing and got lost.” Fifteen years after emancipation, Parke Johnston, a former Virginia slave, vividly recalled “how wild and upset and
dreadful
everything was in them times.”
It came so sudden on ’em they wasn’t prepared for it. Just think of whole droves of people, that had always been kept so close, and hardly ever left the plantation before, turned loose all at once, with nothing in the world, but what they had on their backs, and often little enough of that; men, women and children that had left their homes when they found out they were free, walking along the road with no where to go.
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Since emancipation threatened to undermine the mutual obligations implicit in the master-slave relationship, some freed blacks responded with cries of ingratitude and betrayal that matched in fury the similar reactions of white families to the wartime behavior of certain slaves. When Yankee soldiers told an elderly South Carolina slave that she no longer had a master or mistress, the woman responded as though she had been insulted: “I ain’ no free nigger! I
is
got a marster an’ mistiss! Dee right dar in de great house. Ef you don’ b’lieve me, you go dar an’ see.” Like so many of the older slaves, this woman felt that her services and devotion to the “white folks” over many years had more than fulfilled her part of the relationship. For the family to abandon her now and deprive her of the security, care, and protection she clearly thought she had earned would be, in her view, the rankest form of ingratitude. On a plantation in South Carolina, the oldest black on the place reacted with downright indignation when his former master read the terms of a proposed labor contract; indeed, few blacks expressed the idea of mutual obligations more clearly: