Common Ground (11 page)

Late in November 1833, an eight-year-old girl named Fanny—the daughter of a free black man and a Cherokee Indian woman—was playing on the dusty roadway in front of her Richmond home when she heard the strains of a popular tune drifting down the street. Looking up, she saw a pair of horses drawing a flatbed wagon in which a band of white musicians were scraping on fiddles and tooting on horns. As the wagon drew abreast of her house, it stopped. The driver looked down and asked if she wanted a ride. Fanny hesitated. Her mother had warned her about going off with strange whites, but the tune was so enchanting that Fanny couldn’t resist. She hopped up beside the driver and the wagon clattered off down the street.

One can only imagine what Fanny must have felt when she realized some hours later that the musicians were kidnappers, part of a gang which had been snatching Negro children off Richmond’s streets. But the loss of a freedom
then enjoyed by barely 180,000 blacks among 2.5 million in the slave states must have brought with it a special sense of anguish. That day could only have bequeathed a grievance against white people which would linger in Fanny’s family for generations to come.

Fanny and the other captives were formed into a “coffle,” a long train of slaves fastened together for the march south. The women and girls were tied to one another by ropes wound like halters around their necks, while the men and boys wore iron collars linked by a thick chain, their wrists cuffed behind their backs. The white drivers rode on horseback alongside, carrying whips which they cracked in the air whenever the coffle lagged. The slaves walked twenty-five miles a day, pausing in the morning and evening for meals of corn mush and boiled herring. At the day’s end, still wearing their shackles, they lay down by the roadside to sleep.

After two weeks, Fanny’s coffle reached Augusta, a center of the slave trade for the Savannah River basin. Augusta held its major auction on the first day of every month, when the slaves were led through the crowded streets to the city market, a gleaming white structure topped by a gold cupola. Its ground floor, which opened to the street through rows of Doric columns, was jammed with butcher stalls and fruit stands. In the rear, farmers sold cows, horses, and pigs. Out front stood a large wooden slave block to which, on auction days, the bell in the clock tower summoned a throng of prosperous planters, small farmers, overseers, commission agents, hackmen, gamblers, and blacklegs.

In the crowd that day in early 1834 was Job Gresham, a middle-aged planter from nearby Burke County who had come to the city to stock up on provisions. His wife had long wanted a lady’s maid, and when he spotted little Fanny on the block, he resolved to take her home as a surprise.

Job Gresham was a native Virginian too, but by age twenty-four he’d found his way to Burke County, where he married into a pioneer family. The colonists who had settled that portion of eastern Georgia in the 1740s were drawn by its astonishingly rich soil, ideally suited to the Southern plantation system. “I don’t know exactly what the Good Lord was thinking when he made Burke County,” one early planter said, “but I believe he was thinking about cotton.”

But while King Cotton thrived in Burke’s intense heat, white men working the fields suffered “wasting and tormenting Fluxes, most excruciating Cholicks.” To elude these fevers, Burke’s planters worked out a pleasing accommodation to the climate. Turning the cultivation of their cotton lands over to resident overseers, they arranged to spend much of the year just across the line in Richmond County. There, on a high plateau covered with oak and pine, they founded a resort colony called Brothersville, replete with gleaming bungalows, lush lawns, and picnic grounds. Job Gresham had a house in Brothersville, where he stayed from June through October, returning to his plantation on Briar Creek in November and remaining through the spring planting. As the housemaid, Fanny accompanied the family wherever it went: first cleaning, washing dishes, and polishing silver, later cooking and waiting on table.

Several years after she came to the Greshams’, she accepted the attentions of a field slave named Jack Bennefield, five years her elder. One spring they were married in the traditional slave wedding ceremony: jumping over a broom. Since Fanny was a house slave and Jack a field slave, they held different social positions on the plantation. Normally, Jack would have lived with the other field hands in an Indian-style lean-to. But since he was married to Fanny, the master gave them permission to share one of the little huts behind the Big House.

When Job Gresham died in 1846, his slaves were divided between his two sons—John Jones, then practicing law in Macon, where he twice served as mayor of the city, and Edmund Byne, who remained at home to run the family estate. John received thirteen blacks. Edmund took twenty-two—among them, Fanny and Jack Bennefield.

By 1860, Edmund owned ninety-nine slaves, ranking him tenth in the county. He and his wife, Sarah, treated their slaves with some consideration. But like his father, Edmund spent much of his time in the pine-scented cool of Brothersville, leaving personal supervision of the plantation to his overseer, Henry Ward. Ward was a hard man who drove the slaves relentlessly, and his wife was even harder. Once, when a cook burned the biscuits, Mrs. Ward made her strip to the waist and—as Fanny watched in horror—beat her with a willow branch until the blood ran down her back.

As war drew near, Edmund played a growing role in the county’s affairs. One of three delegates from Burke to Georgia’s Secession Convention, he sat down in his hotel room at Milledgeville on January 9, 1861, and wrote his wife: “This day will be long remembered by Georgia. We have passed the ordinance of secession by a vote of 208 to 89. The ordinance will be signed on Monday at 12 o’clock and now, while I am writing, the cannon is firing, the bells are ringing and every other demonstration of joy you can conceive of is going on.” Once the fighting began, the Greshams did their part. At age fifty-two, Edmund was too old for active duty, but both his sons saw service.

After the Confederacy’s capitulation in April 1865, Augusta’s ex-slaves petitioned the government for some means of marking their emancipation. Authorities scheduled a massive parade on July 4, the date most closely identified with American freedom. Before dawn that day thousands of former slaves from surrounding counties—Fanny and Jack Bennefield among them—set out on foot for Augusta. Whites retreated behind shuttered windows, leaving the streets to the Negroes, who lined the parade route ten deep. At noon a detachment of the Thirty-third United States Colored Troops proudly stepped off, leading a procession of 4,000 wildly exultant Negroes. Later, some 10,000 blacks assembled before the city market—where thirty-one years before Fanny had been auctioned on the slave block—to hear the Reverend James Lynch deliver his “liberation sermon.”

In those first months after the war, thousands of freed slaves descended on Waynesboro and Augusta to agitate for change. To Fanny and Jack Bennefield, emancipation meant sweet revenge on their overseer, Henry Ward, and especially
on his terrible wife. When Union soldiers heard about Mrs. Ward, they made her “dance the jig” all the way to Waynesboro, more than twelve miles. On the outskirts of town she collapsed in the dusty road.

With the Wards gone, Edmund and Sarah Gresham spent more time at the “Home Place,” bringing their more benevolent style to the fields. The Freedmen’s Bureau, charged with protecting the rights of freed slaves, established a “contract” system with minimum wages, stipulated rations and sick time—able-bodied males like Jack received $8.00 a month, a woman hand like Fanny $4.00. But the relationship between employers and laborers hadn’t changed greatly from prewar days. The “hands” still lived in the slave quarters, drew rations from the smokehouse, worked in gangs under white “managers.” The Greshams provided virtually everything Fanny and Jack needed for their daily lives, subtracting the value of those goods and services from their wages: $3.00 for a pair of shoes, 75 cents for two plugs of tobacco, 25 cents for a dose of castor oil. At month’s end most hands had little, if anything, coming to them.

So long as the freedman accepted his new lot, his life was bearable, but if he objected, arguing that this wasn’t the emancipation they’d been promised, retribution could be swift and sure. In 1866, flogging “as in slave days” was common in Burke (Jack Bennefield’s back, his grandson recalls, looked like a “washboard” from all the beatings he’d taken). By March 1868 the Ku Klux Klan was active in the county. In a single month that spring, three freedmen were shot to death by whites.

For the Greshams, Reconstruction was a trying period. It took time to accommodate themselves to the new realities. When John Jones Gresham married one of the county’s belles, his uncle wrote from Macon: “I am sorry that circumstances are such that I cannot give him a Negro, but I must do the next best thing left, that is give him a mule.”

Of all the Greshams, young Job—a grandson of the original Job Gresham—was the most capable. Mustered out of the Georgia Volunteers at Appomattox, he walked the four hundred miles back to Burke County, where he took over a plantation which had belonged to a distant cousin named William Byne. It was a pleasant spread, with nine hundred acres of cotton land, an orchard, a smokehouse, and an iron foundry—a big place that needed more than Byne’s hands to farm it. After Edmund Gresham died in 1872, his widow sent over four men to help her son—among them, Jack Bennefield.

Jack and Fanny Bennefield had one child, Cornelia, who married Frederick Walker, one of Edmund Gresham’s slaves. By 1880, Fred had joined Jack on Job Gresham’s place. Each tilled a “plow”—about twenty-five acres of cotton land, a few more for corn and vegetables—for which they paid Job a bale of cotton. They relied heavily on their wives and children to hoe and weed the fields, then pick the cotton in the fall, harvesting about ten bales a year. With prices averaging $50 a bale, they earned about $500 a year. But they didn’t keep much of it. Off the top came the bale each owed Job. Moreover, Job provided them with seed, implements, and food, to be paid for, with substantial
interest, after the harvest. Once those debts were paid, the Bennefields and Walkers had just enough to squeak by on until it was planting time again. In 1881, Jack Bennefield had a $50 mule, $25 worth of farm tools, and $10 in household furniture—a net worth of $85.

Later they got their credit from merchants in nearby Keysville, who had a wider range of goods than Job could provide but who squeezed every cent of interest they could out of the farmers. If a tenant failed to pay his debts, the landlord or merchant would seize his crop, his meager belongings, even his dog or cat. The desperate farmer often tried to hide a few vegetables to feed his family. Once Sol Walker—Fred’s brother—was beaten severely by his landlord for attempting to conceal some corn inside his mattress.

Job’s Negroes sought solace from the hardships of this world at the Antioch Baptist Church. The Bennefields and Walkers were all members of Antioch, and Sol Walker was long one of its deacons. The Reverend Seaborn Jones, its pastor for fifty years, was a preacher of great passion and greater volume, whose Sunday-morning sermons, it was said, could be heard half a mile away. And everybody up and down the old “Gresham Highway” could hear Jake Mitchell, the church drummer, as he marched by banging the drum to proclaim the death of an Antioch member.

One morning in 1892, Jake banged his drum for old Jack Bennefield, dead at seventy-two. (Fanny lived nearly half a century longer, dying in 1933 at the age of 108, when she was buried in the Gresham Cemetery a few feet from her first master, Job Gresham.) By the time of Jack’s death, Cornelia and Frederick Walker had nine children of their own with whom they lived in a two-room, tin-roofed shack made of logs with gaping chinks through which the wind whistled.

Fanny and Jack Bennefield had never learned to read or write—Georgia law before the Civil War prescribed a stiff fine for anyone caught educating a slave—and Cornelia and Frederick had had only a year or two of grade school. The Walker children didn’t do much better. They went to the all-black Spring Hill School, where they received the rudiments of learning, but most of them left well before the eighth grade to join their parents in the fields.

Soon, however, those fields were ravaged by the boll weevil. As late as 1918, Burke County had produced a record 70,877 bales of cotton; by 1921, production had plummeted to 14,386 bales. White planters, who had once bet a dozen bales on a poker hand, were lucky to harvest that many from their blasted land. And black tenant farmers, with no resources to fall back on, were devastated. In 1922, the Waynesboro Women’s Club, chaired by Mrs. Orrin Gresham, Job’s niece, launched a campaign to assist needy children suffering from the winter cold. Appealing for sweaters, coats, and shoes, she said, “This is not only to supply a need but to let these people realize we mean to see them through.”

But Burke’s Negroes had little faith in their former masters. In 1922 alone, 5,000 of the county’s 24,775 blacks departed, joining a massive flood of Negroes streaming North. Many who boarded the Dixie Flyer or the Southland
in Augusta disembarked in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, but others stayed aboard until their train reached Boston. Though wages were lower there than in the mid-Atlantic cities, there was something about Boston that drew Southern Negroes. It was from Boston that the abolitionists had issued their calls for a holy war against slavery. It was there that many blacks fled in the underground railway, relying on Bostonians to forward them to Canada. It was to Boston that David Walker, a North Carolina Negro, fled in 1825, and there that he issued his fiery pamphlet
Walker’s Appeal
(“Brethren, arise, arise! Strike for your lives and liberties!”), which was widely distributed in Georgia.

The image of Boston as a sanctuary was encouraged by black writers who, over the years, described it as “a city of refuge, a place of light, life, and liberty,” the one place in America “where the black man is given equal justice,” and even, euphorically, “the Paradise of the Negro.”