Been in the Storm So Long (50 page)

Although former slaves chose to manifest their freedom in many different ways, with each individual acting on his or her own set of priorities, nearly all of them could subscribe to the underlying principle that emancipation had enabled them to become their own masters. And those were precisely the terms they most often employed to define their freedom. When the earliest contrabands reached Fortress Monroe, they testified that the most compelling idea in their minds had been “to belong to ourselves.” To the familiar question so often put to them as slaves, “Who do you b’long to, boy?” a Georgia freedman responded in 1865, “Ise don’t b’longs to nobody, Missus. Ise owns self, en b’longs to Macon.” For many of the emancipated slaves, freedom of action—the chance “to do something on their own account”—went to the very heart of their new condition. Not surprisingly, few other manifestations of black freedom would prove more irritating to their previous owners, many of whom failed to appreciate the importance of this concept in the lives of people whose actions they had tried so rigidly to control. “ ’Twould be amusing if it were not too pitiful to hear their idea of freedom,” sighed Grace Elmore, a South Carolina woman, after she discussed the question with one of her servants. “I asked Phillis if she likes the thought of being free. She said yes, tho she had always been treated with perfect kindness and could complain of nothing in her lot, but she had heard a woman who had bought her freedom from kind indulgent owners, say it was a very sweet thing to be able to do as she chose, to sit and do nothing, to work if she desired, or to go out as she liked, and ask nobody’s permission. And that was just her feeling. ‘She wished the power to do as she chose.’ ”
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When asked what price tag he now bore, an Alabama freedman replied, “I’s free. Ain’t wuf nuffin.” The northern visitor who asked the question did so after hearing that plantation hands in the Black Belt districts had no real understanding of freedom. Whatever remained vague about their new status, every freedman realized that he was no longer an article of merchandise, subject to sale at the whim, bankruptcy, or death of his owner. He understood, too, that freedom secured his family from involuntary disruption. If the freedman could not immediately support his wife and children, he at least had the satisfaction of knowing that any income or property he henceforth accumulated from his labor would be his to retain. That realization was in itself immensely gratifying. After earning his first dollar, working on the railroad after the war, a former Arkansas slave recalled that he “felt like the richest man in the world!” Even ex-slaves who had been treated well readily appreciated this crucial difference between bondage and freedom. “I was brought up with the white folks, just like one of them,” declared a slave refugee who had fled to the Union lines; “these hands never had any hard work to do. I had a kind master; but I didn’t know but any time I might be sold away off, and when I found
I could get my freedom, I was very glad; and I wouldn’t go back again, because now I am for myself.” That same point was made by a South Carolina freedman when a reporter asked him why he did not want to return to a mistress who, by his own admission, had treated him well. “Why, sar,” he explained, “all I made before was Miss Pinckney’s, but all I make now is my own.”
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Other than instructing them to “labor faithfully for reasonable wages” and “to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence,” the Emancipation Proclamation provided newly freed slaves with no real guidelines. Nor did subsequent Federal policies provide any underpinning for their new status. Clearly, black people were now free. But how free? Few knew for certain, though many whites had ideas about both the quality and the durability of black freedom. “These niggers will all be slaves again in twelve months,” a Mississippi planter told a Union officer. “You have nothing but Lincoln’s proclamation to make them free.” He had, in fact, made a telling point. No official document by itself could turn a slave into a free man, nor could the Yankees, the white missionary teachers, or the most sympathetic southern whites perform that feat. To know “de feel of bein’ free” demanded that the ex-slave begin to act like a free man, that he test his freedom, that he make some kind of exploratory move, that he prove to himself (as well as to others) by some concrete act that he was truly free. The nature or the boldness of that act was far less important than the feeling he derived from it. The action undertaken by Exter Durham of North Carolina, for example, could hardly be described as a startling break with the past. Upon being informed of his new status, he gathered his few belongings together and left the Snipes Durham plantation in Orange County for the George Herndon plantation in adjoining Chatham County. But to Exter Durham and his wife, Tempie Herndon, who had belonged to different masters, this move meant everything—“kaze den me an’ Exter could be together all de time ’stead of Saturday an’ Sunday.”
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By enlarging the freedman’s sense of what was attainable, desirable, and tolerable, emancipation encouraged a degree of independence and assertiveness which bondage had sharply contained. To leave the plantation without a pass, to slow the pace of work, to haggle over wages and conditions, to refuse punishment, or to violate racial etiquette were all ways of testing the limits of freedom. No doubt a Mississippi freedman derived considerable satisfaction from refusing to remove his hat when ordered to do so in the presence of a white man, as did a Richmond black who turned down the request of a white man to help him lift a barrel, telling him at the same time, “No, you white people think you can order black people around as you please.” To those long accustomed to absolute control, even the smallest exercise of personal freedom by a former slave, no matter how innocently intended, could have an unsettling effect.
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Acting as individuals and families, usually without the semblance of organized effort, freed slaves began the arduous process of ascertaining the boundaries of freedom. If few of them indulged in land seizures, arson, or
physical attacks on whites, this suggests that most blacks perceived the need to exercise their freedom with some degree of appreciation for where the power still rested in their communities. But whatever action a freedman deemed appropriate, no matter how restrained or insignificant it may have appeared to others, the objective remained essentially the same—to achieve some recognition, even if only grudgingly given, of that new sense of dignity and self-respect which emancipation encouraged in them. Few expressed it more graphically than an elderly freedman in South Carolina when he explained to a black schoolteacher why he rejoiced over his new status: “Don’t hab me feelins hurt now. Used to hab me feelins hurt all de time. But don’t hab em hurt now, no more.” Whenever he reflected back on slavery, Stephen McCray testified many years later, he thought invariably of the story of the coon and the dog. “The coon said to the dog: ‘Why is it you’re so fat and I am so poor, and we is both animals?’ The dog said: ‘I lay round Master’s house and let him kick me and he gives me a piece of bread right on.’ Said the coon to the dog: ‘Better then that I stay poor.’ Them’s my sentiment. I’m lak the coon. I don’t believe in ‘buse.”
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To dwell only on the most dramatic manifestations of freedom would distort the experience entirely. If a former slave should decide, for example, to change his employer, that might simply entail a move from his old plantation to the next one down the road. This was not about to alter in any significant degree his day-to-day life but to many a freedman, as to Ambus Gray of Alabama, that had been the “one difference” between freedom and bondage: “You could change places and work for different men.” Even if a slave chose to stay with his master after emancipation, even if his demeanor remained unchanged, even if his fidelity to the “white folks” stood unshaken, this did not necessarily mean that nothing had happened to him or that he failed to grasp the meaning of his freedom. “When you’all had de power you was good to me,” an elderly black man told his former master in May 1865, “and I’ll protect you now. No niggers nor Yankees shall touch you. If you want anything, call for Sambo. I mean, call for Mr. Samuel—that’s my name now.”
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To determine the “one difference” between freedom and bondage, the ex-slaves found themselves driven in many directions at the same time. But the distance they placed between themselves and their old status could not be measured by how far they traveled or even if they left the old plantation. That “difference” could most often be perceived in the choices now available to them, in the securing of families and the location of loved ones who had been sold away, in the sanctification of marital ties, in the taking of a new surname or the revelation of an old one, in the opportunity to achieve literacy, in the chance to move their religious services from “down in the hollow” to their own churches, in sitting where they pleased in public places, in working where the rewards were commensurate with their labor. What emancipation introduced into the lives of many black people was not only the element of choice but a leap of confidence in the ability to effect changes in their own lives without deferring to whites. “What I likes bes,
to be slave or free?” Margrett Nillin, a former Texas slave, pondered over that question many decades after her emancipation. “Well, it’s dis way,” she answered. “In slavery I owns nothin’ and never owns nothin’. In freedom I’s own de home and raise de family. All dat cause me worryment and in slavery I has no worryment, but I takes de freedom.”
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N
OTHING EXHILARATED
Charlie Barbour more in the aftermath of emancipation than to know “dat I won’t wake up some mornin’ ter fin’ dat my mammy or some ob de rest of my family am done sold.” With even more vivid memories, Jacob Thomas, who had seen his parents separated by sale, had no difficulty many decades later in relating what for him had been the overriding significance of freedom: “I has got thirteen great-gran’ chilluns an’ I knows whar dey ever’one am. In slavery times dey’d have been on de block long time ago.” For the tens of thousands of slaves who had been involuntarily separated from their loved ones, freedom raised equally exciting prospects. Rather than have to wait for the heavenly reunions they had sung about, they might anticipate seeing each other again in this world. To William Curtis, a former Georgia slave whose father had been sold to a Virginia planter, “dat was de best thing about de war setting us free, he could come back to us.”
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Few scenes acted out in the post-emancipation South exceeded the drama, the emotion, the poignancy that marked the reunions of families which had been torn asunder by slavery. The last time Ben and Betty Dodson had seen each other, they had begged their master to sell them together; twenty years passed before the couple met again—in a refugee camp. “Glory! glory! hallelujah,” Ben Dodson shouted as he alternated between embracing his wife and stepping back to reassure himself that it was really she. “Dis is my Betty, shuah. I foun’ you at las’. I’s hunted an’ hunted till I track you up here. I’s boun’ to hunt till I fin’ you if you’s alive.” In many such reunions, the passage of time and the effects of bondage made recognition nearly impossible. Not until the woman at the door removed her hat and the bundle she carried on her head did a young Tennessee freedwoman discern the scar on her face, and only then did she know for certain that she was gazing upon her mother, whom she had not seen since childhood. In a Virginia refugee camp, a mother found her daughter, now eighteen years old, who had been sold away from her when only an infant. “See how they’ve done her bad,” the mother declared to anyone who would listen. “See how they’ve cut her up. From her head to her feet she is scarred just as you see her face.”
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Each reunion had its own incredible story, revealing the extraordinary resourcefulness with which husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters sought each other out in the immediate aftermath of
Union occupation and emancipation. Family members embarked on these searches, a much-impressed Freedmen’s Bureau officer reported, “with an ardor and faithfulness sufficient to vindicate the fidelity and affection of any race—the excited joys of the regathering being equalled only by the previous sorrows and pains of separation.” The attempts freedmen made to relocate loved ones forcefully belied the commonly held theories about a race of moral cripples who placed little value on marital and familial ties. Even some of the most dedicated abolitionists subscribed to these theories, attributing the blacks’ moral insensibility, “licentiousness,” and “false ideas touching chastity” to the evil influences of bondage. Like most whites, they tended to underestimate the depth of familial love and emotional attachment that induced so many former slaves to make the location of relatives their first priority after emancipation. “They had a passion, not so much for wandering, as for getting together,” a Freedmen’s Bureau agent in South Carolina wrote of the postwar migrations of blacks; “and every mother’s son among them seemed to be in search of his mother; every mother in search of her children. In their eyes the work of emancipation was incomplete until the families which had been dispersed by slavery were reunited.” In North Carolina, a northern journalist encountered a middle-aged freedman—“plodding along, staff in hand, and apparently very footsore and tired”—who had already walked nearly six hundred miles in his determination to reach the wife and children he had been sold away from four years before.
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