Been in the Storm So Long (49 page)

N
OT LONG AFTER HEARING
of their freedom, two young house servants on a plantation in Florida, unaware that they were being overheard, sat on the back porch one evening and exchanged thoughts about the kind of future they envisioned for themselves. One of them, Frances, had been a childhood gift to her equally young mistress, Martha, who had taught her to read and write. Like so many newly emancipated slaves, Frances had her full share of fantasies about a new life under freedom. To talk about them, as she did with another servant, had a way of making them seem almost real.

The two young women then vanished into the darkness. Several months after their conversation, without saying anything to the former owner, every freed slave on the plantation had left for new jobs and places. The day on which they made their mass exodus seemed somehow appropriate: New Year’s Day 1866, the third anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Several of them would soon return, however, their bodies lean with hunger and ravished by disease, their expectations shattered and their hopes deferred. Frances and Bethiah were apparently not among them, but they, too, like so many others, were bound to discover that “revolutions may go backward.”
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E
VEN AS SLAVES
, black people had often tried to conceptualize for themselves a life outside of bondage and beyond the plantations and farms which constituted the only world they knew. After learning of their freedom, however, the conversations in the quarters, in the fields, and in the kitchens turned to alternatives that were suddenly real, to new ways of living and working, and to aspirations they might hope to satisfy in their own lifetimes. To talk about the possibilities could be downright exhilarating, even infectious. But when it came to acting out these feelings, the old fears
and insecurities and the still pervasive dependency on their former owners would first have to be surmounted. That came easily for some but not for most. “They were like a bird let out of a cage,” a Virginia freedman explained. “You know how a bird that has been long in a cage will act when the door is opened; he makes a curious fluttering for a little while. It was just so with the colored people. They didn’t know at first what to do with themselves. But they got sobered pretty soon.” That same imagery of birds freed from a cage occurred to a white Georgian, but she could think only of birds who were “helpless” and others, like the hawk, whose release would most likely inflict “mischief” on everyone.
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The Confederacy lay in ruins. The white South, however, demonstrated remarkable intransigence and evinced few signs of repentance or enlightenment. Rather than rethink their values and assumptions, most whites preferred to romanticize about the martyred Lost Cause. Although resigned to legal emancipation for nearly four million black men and women, most whites clung even more tenaciously to traditional notions of racial solidarity and black inferiority. Whatever “mischief” emancipation unleashed, what it could not do, as a Georgia editor suggested, was far more crucial: it could not transform the Negro into a white man.

Even the white conquerors of the South might not have thought to question the universal wisdom of that comforting observation. The
Cincinnati Enquirer
, in fact, offered its own variant of a popular theme: “Slavery is dead, the negro is not, there is the misfortune. For the sake of all parties, would that he were.”
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To what, then, could freed blacks aspire in a society dominated by white men and women intent on using any means to perpetuate that domination? For any freedman or freedwoman to linger too long over that question might be both demoralizing and self-deprecating. If emancipation by itself could touch their lives and destinies in any significant way, some blacks expressed the hope that it would turn them white. In one Virginia household, a young servant expressed her disappointment over the failure of emancipation to do precisely that. Nor did the reassuring words of her mistress—“You must not be ashamed of the skin God gave you. Your skin is all right”—make any impression on the young woman. “I druther be white,” she persisted. Reflecting later upon this incident, the mistress’s daughter concluded that there had been “something pathetic in the aspiration.”
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But what this discouraged black youth had suggested, in her own unique way, were simply the dimensions of the problem her people now faced. Despite emancipation, she realized that to be free was not to be like everyone else. With equal clarity, she perceived that to be white in American society was to be something, perhaps everything. That was a doctrine more fundamental and far-reaching in its implications than scores of emancipation proclamations, constitutional amendments, legislative enactments, and court decisions. George G. King, a former South Carolina slave, knew that only too well from his own experience. Born on a plantation appropriately called “two-hundred acres of Hell,” he had been subjected to a “devil overseer,” a “she-devil Mistress,” and a master who “talked hard words.” He would never forget the sight of his mistress walking away laughing while his mother screamed and groaned after a brutal whipping. Having witnessed and endured all of this, how much could he have expected of emancipation? His master had tried to allay any initial misconceptions. “The Master he says we are all free,” King recalled of that day, “but it don’t mean we is white. And it don’t mean we is equal. Just equal for to work and earn our own living and not depend on him for no more meats and clothes.”
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Although emancipation left skin hues unaltered, freedmen might still wish to fashion their aspirations and way of life after those who had always enjoyed freedom and whose comforts, diversions, and manners they had observed for so many years. To be free invited flights into fantasy, grandiose visions of a new life, not a life in which oppression and exploitation are vanquished but in which the roles are reversed and the blacks find themselves in the seats of power and the whites are relegated to the kitchens and fields.

After all, only a few years before, who would have thought it conceivable that slaves would be armed and would march through the countryside to do battle with their “masters”? Nothing seemed impossible any longer, not even the division of the master’s lands among his former slaves. “It’s de white man’s turn ter labor now,” an ex-slave preacher told a torch rally near the Lester plantation in Florida, and that was as it should be.

The elderly slave woman in South Carolina who had welcomed the Yankees with visions of “settin’ at de white folks’ table, a eating off de white folks’ table, and a rocking in de big rocking chair” might have witnessed such scenes by visiting the plantations and town houses abandoned by the owners and occupied by former slaves. Whatever had induced such visions was less important than the way in which freed blacks chose to manifest them. The housemaid who had experienced a lifetime of reprimands, the field hands who knew no other routines, the urban laborers whose earnings had been pocketed by their owners might now aspire to something different. After still another scolding for her alleged incompetence, a servant finally turned on her mistress and retorted, “I expect the white folks to be waiting on me before long!”
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To indulge in such fantasies might be momentarily satisfying but it did nothing to resolve the slave’s immediate predicament after emancipation. At some point, he would have to appraise his position realistically and define for himself the content of his freedom. After three days of “shoutin’ an’ carryin’ on,” the blacks at Wood’s Crossing, Virginia, began their first Sunday as free men and women in a reflective mood. “We was all sittin’ roun’ restin’,” Charlotte Brown recalled, “an’ tryin’ to think what freedom meant an’ ev’ybody was quiet an’ peaceful.” Suddenly, Sister Carrie, an elderly black woman, began to chant:

When she came to the words “Stomp it down!” the others began to shout along with her until they finally made up music to accompany their words. Like Sister Carrie’s chant, the initial attempts to define freedom drew largely on the most familiar images of slavery. If the future still seemed clouded with uncertainty, what blacks had experienced as slaves remained abundantly clear and vivid, so that freedom in its most immediate and meaningful sense could best be understood in terms of the limitations placed on white behavior. On the Sea Islands, slaves had interpreted the flight of their masters as meaning “no more driver, no more cotton, no more lickin’,” and with freedom they were “done wid massa’s hollerin’ ” and “done wid missus’ scoldin’.” The popular wartime spiritual “Many Thousand Go” similarly dwelled on freedom as a release from the most oppressive aspects of bondage: the inadequate rations, the whippings, the work routines, and the harassment—“No more peck o’corn for me,” “No more driver’s lash for me,” “No more pint o’salt for me,” “No more hundred lash for me,” and “No more mistress’ call for me.” Even the “hard times” and arduous labor that would characterize the postwar years in no way diminished the value ex-slaves placed on their freedom. “I’s mighty well pleased
tu git my eatin’ by de ‘sweat o’ my face,’ ” a newly freed slave wrote his brother, “an’ all I ax o’ ole masser’s tu jes’ keep he hands off o’ de Lawd Almighty’s property, fur
dat’s me.
”
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