Been in the Storm So Long (52 page)

After emancipation, husbands and wives who had lived in this manner quickly seized the opportunity to spend more than weekends together and settled down, usually, on one or the other place.
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Upon learning of their freedom, a former slave recalled, the older blacks “knowed what it meant, but us young ones didn’t.” Many of them would learn soon enough, often in ways that proved to be quite memorable and traumatic. Husbands and wives not only located each other in the aftermath of emancipation but made what one Federal officer described as “superhuman efforts” to find the children who had been sold away from them; indeed, numerous ex-slaves would recall that their first realization of freedom came when a parent, a sibling, or an aunt or uncle suddenly appeared to take them away.
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Depending on the circumstances of their separation, such reunions could result in outbursts of unbounded joy or produce very mixed emotions, particularly in young blacks who had little or no recollection of their parents. Having been raised by someone else, to whom firm emotional commitments may have been made, the sudden appearance of a strange man or woman who claimed to be a father or mother was a terribly confusing and agonizing moment, even more so if faced with the prospect of separation from those they had grown to love.

Since infancy, when her mother had been sold away, Frankie Goole had been reared by her white mistress, slept in the same room with her, and she came to regard her with considerable affection. At the age of
twelve, with the war over, Frankie found herself in a courtroom standing next to a woman who claimed to be her mother and facing a judge who asked her to verify it. “I dunno, she sezs she ez,” Frankie remembered having told him. Reflecting back on that moment many years later, she summed up the confusion she had felt: “W’at did I know ob a mammy dat wuz tuk fum me at six weeks ole.” When Harriet Clemens fled a plantation in Mississippi before the war (“It was on ’count o’ de Nigger overseers. Dey kep’ a-tryin’ to mess ’roun’ wid her an’ she wouldn’ have nothin’ to do wid ’em”), she left her small child in the care of an elderly woman addressed as Aunt Emmaline, who “kep’ all de orphunt chillun an’ dem who’s mammas had been sent off to de breedin’ quarters.” As soon as the war ended, she returned to claim her daughter. “At firs’ I was scared o’ her, ’cause I didn’ know who she was,” the daughter recalled. “She put me in her lap an’ she mos’ nigh cried when she seen de back o’ my head. Dey was awful sores where de lice had been an’ I had scratched ’em. She sho’ jumped Aunt Emmaline ’bout dat. Us lef dat day …”
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On some plantations, the mistress had made a practice of selecting certain young slaves and moving them into the Big House to train them to be maids. Sarah Debro, a former North Carolina slave, recalled being separated from her mother for that purpose. “De day she took me my mammy cried kaze she knew I would never be ’lowed to live at de cabin wid her no more.” While life in the Big House had both advantages and disadvantages, depending on the moods of the “white folks,” the impressions it made on a young slave could be incalculable.

After the war, her mother immediately came to claim her. But Sarah refused to leave, crying and holding on to the dress of her mistress, who pleaded for the right to retain her. Despite the tears and pleas, Sarah’s mother remained firm and reminded the mistress that only her callousness had made this scene possible. “You took her away from me an’ didn’ pay no mind to my cryin’, so now I’se takin’ her back home. We’s free now, Mis’ Polly, we ain’t gwine be slaves no more to nobody.” With those words, she dragged her daughter out of the house. “I can see how Mis’ Polly looked now,” Sarah Debro recollected. “She didn’ say nothin’ but she looked hard at Mammy an’ her face was white.” That night, in the windowless “mud house” to which they moved, Sarah lay on her straw mattress and looked up through the cracks in the roof. “I could see de stars, an’ de sky shinin’ through de cracks looked like long blue splinters stretched ’cross de rafters. I lay dare an’ cried kaze I wanted to go back to Mis’ Polly.”
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The close relationships that sometimes developed between slave children
and the white mistress could be even more psychologically damaging than separation by sale. Where a master or mistress made “pets” out of certain favorites, indulging them in ways their parents could not, a conflict of loyalties became highly possible. Jane Sutton, a former Mississippi slave, contrasted her master, who provided the blacks with “plenty t’eat an’ wear” and gave the children candy and presents when he returned from town, with her father, who belonged to a neighboring planter and visited on weekends. “He jus’ come on Satu’d’y night an’ us don’ see much of’im. Us call him ‘dat man.’ Mammy tol’ us to be more ’spectful to ’im ’cause he was us daddy, but us aint care nothin’ ’bout ’im. He aint never brung us no candy or nothin’.” Rather than live with her father after emancipation, Jane ran away and returned to the old plantation. With equally conflicting emotions, Lizzie Hill, who had been a slave in Alabama, ran away from her mother three times after the war in order to return to the plantation where she had been accorded the same food and clothes as the white children with whom she had played and slept. Nor could Lou Turner easily give up the life she had led as a young slave on a Texas plantation, where the mistress had fed her well, dressed her in nice clothes, and insisted on her sleeping in the same room. “Old missy have seven li’l nigger chillen what belong to her slaves, but dey mammies and daddys come git ’em. I didn’t own my own mammy. I own my old missy and call her ‘mama.’ Us cry and cry when us have to go with us mammy.”
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But for most young blacks and children, slavery had been something less than a playground. The examples of brutal treatment, abuse, and neglect were no mere figments of the abolitionist imagination. If some absorbed the cultural ethos of the white family from constant contact with it, the vast majority of black children formed their view of the world in the quarters and usually within their own family groupings. More often than not, the child’s teacher, school, and family were all the same, and the values and warnings with which he or she was inculcated reflected the experience of parents and grandparents who had themselves learned these lessons in the same way. In the absence of parents, the child was still more likely to obtain the love and learning he needed from other blacks than from his “white folks.”
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Not only did many black youths embrace the chance to sever the ties with their master and mistress but those who had been separated from loved ones often took the initiative to find them. After learning of her freedom in 1863, for example, Mary Armstrong, a seventeen-year-old Missouri youth, went in search of her mother, who had been sold and taken to Texas. Several years later, she tracked her down in Wharton County. “Law me, talk ’bout cryin’ and singin’ and cryin’ some more, we sure done it,” she recalled of their reunion. Whatever the wishes of parents or children, some dispossessed masters insisted on keeping the young blacks until the age of twenty-one. The various state apprenticeship laws came close to legalized kidnapping in many instances, depriving parents of children if a white judge deemed it “better for the habits and comfort” of a child to be bound out to a white guardian. Protests over
arbitrary apprenticeship mounted in the postwar years, with parents frequently appealing to the local provost marshal or the Freedmen’s Bureau for custodial rights to their children.
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Few memories of bondage elicited greater pain in black parents than the humiliation they had suffered in watching their children whipped or abused by a member of the white family. After emancipation, if they decided to remain with the same master or if they hired out elsewhere, freedmen families often made their labor contingent on the abolition of such practices and a recognition of their exclusive right to manage and discipline their own children. Employers who violated that understanding were apt to find themselves with fewer laborers the next morning or when the time came to renew a contract. With equal fervor, parents committed themselves in the immediate aftermath of emancipation to provide an education for their children, not only in the numerous schools established by northern whites but in schools which employers were forced to establish on their plantations in order to retain and attract a labor force.

Deprived of any legal standing, stripped of any means to protect itself, faced always with the specter of forced breakup, the black family under slavery needed to demonstrate remarkable resiliency to withstand the often debilitating and debasing experience of white ownership. While some slaveholders recognized and encouraged strong family ties for the stabilizing influence they exerted, many others were either indifferent, thought their blacks to be emotionally incapable of sustaining the necessary affection, or resented any attempts by them to ape the social norms of their superiors. “I was once whipped,” a black servant in New Orleans remarked, “because I said to missis, ‘My mother sent me.’ We were not allowed to call our mammies ‘mother.’ It made it come too near the way of the white folks.” Whatever the prevailing attitudes of individual masters or mistresses, every black family had to find ways to counter the sense of powerlessness imparted by white ownership. Not only did they lack control over separation by sale but the people who owned them were free to inflict indignities, both physical and verbal, as their moods dictated, and they were apt to do so in the presence of the entire family. To calculate the brutalities of the “peculiar institution” by counting the number of whippings meted out by a master or overseer would be to miss the point altogether, as nearly every slave who wrote about his or her experience would testify.
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Although some slave families were disrupted, by irreparable psychic damage if not by sale, what seems so remarkable is that most of them endured the experience of bondage. On most plantations and farms, the lives of the slaves—field hands, house servants, and artisans alike—revolved around family units, the two-parent household predominated, and the black husband and father exerted in his own way the dominant influence in that household. If he could not always provide for his family as he wished, he tried to supplement their diets by hunting, fishing, and theft. If he could not always protect his family as he wished, he often managed
to lay down a line of tolerated behavior beyond which masters and overseers proceeded at their own risk. Sam Watkins, a Tennessee planter, was among those who flagrantly crossed that line once too often.

Few wives expected their husbands to sacrifice their lives in this way. Fully aware of the master’s power, most couples made the necessary accommodation. That reflected not indifference to family ties but the simple resolve to keep the family together and alive. The same consideration would impede escape until the proximity of the Union Army enabled entire families to leave the plantations.

During the Civil War, the black family had to withstand attacks from various sources. Numbers of slaves who accompanied their masters to the front lines never returned, nor did many of those impressed into Confederate labor battalions. “Father wus sent to Manassas Gap at the beginning of de war,” a former Virginia slave recalled, “and I do not ’member ever seein’ him.” When freedmen attempted to trace lost family members after emancipation, the trail often started and ended with the information that he was last seen in “a gang [that] was taken away de firs year of de war.” The wartime decisions to remove slaves to Texas or to some “safe” place in the interior resulted in still further disruptions, with the women, children, and elderly blacks often left on the old place. Nor did the coming of the Union Army necessarily secure black families; instead, some of the men enlisted or were forcibly impressed into service as military laborers and soldiers. Whatever the commitment of slaves to the Union cause, many of them feared that service in the Union Army would place their wives and children in immediate jeopardy from hostile whites and deprive them of necessary support. Such fears were not illusory. Enraged over losing any of their slaves, particularly to the Union Army, masters were known to avenge themselves on the soldiers’ wives and children, either by abusing them, refusing to support them, or expelling them from the premises. Only after strong pressure from black soldiers who threatened mutiny and desertion did the Federal government belatedly guarantee freedom to the families of black volunteers, make them eligible for rations, and try to ensure their safety. By this time, however, numerous families had already been disrupted.
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When weighed against the enormous tensions to which slave marital ties were subjected, the prospects for success under any circumstances might have seemed dim. The very words by which marriages were solemnized indicated their vulnerability. “Don’t mean nothin’ less you say, ‘What God done jined, cain’t no man pull asunder,’ ” a former Virginia
slave observed. “But dey never would say dat. Jus’ say, ‘Now you married.’ ” The classic account of the slave preacher in Kentucky who united couples “until death or
distance
do you part” had its equivalent in the Virginia master who, as one of his former slaves recalled, devised his own marriage vows by which he united slave couples: