Been in the Storm So Long (57 page)

What the white South characterized as “insolence,” “sauciness,” and “putting on airs” were more often than not simply the ways many ex-slaves chose to demonstrate their freedom. To refuse to touch their hats to whites, to ignore their former masters or mistresses in the streets, to remain seated while speaking with whites, or to neglect to yield the sidewalks to them were not so much discourtesies or intended provocations as positive assertions of their new status as free men and women. But each of these actions violated the white man’s double standard. That is, although few whites would have thought of extending any of these social courtesies to black men or women, they insisted that the freedmen comply, as before, with the traditional and one-sided code of etiquette. The failure of blacks to do so, or still worse their open refusal, constituted further evidence of how emancipation had “ruined” them and filled their heads with mistaken notions about their place in society. “Their freedom’s made ’em so sassy there’s no livin’ with ’em,” an exasperated North Carolinian declared. Even the usually mild-mannered, gentlemanly Henry W. Ravenel, who had often expressed his pleasure at the “good” conduct of the ex-slaves, could scarcely believe what he saw during a visit to Charleston several months after the end of the war.

As if this were not bad enough, his own personal servant became “excessively insolent” after being exposed to city life. “So much for the fidelity of indulged servants,” Ravenel sighed. “I bought him at his own request and he had always fared as I had. I am utterly disgusted with the race, and trust that I may some day be in a land that is purged of them.”
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Rather than confess their sense of betrayal, many whites preferred another explanation, one that had served them well during the war. The “insolent” freedmen were exhibiting the natural effects of contamination from Yankee soldiers (white and black) and northern missionaries and teachers. After being shoved off the sidewalk by blacks, Eliza Andrews recalled “a time when such conduct would have been rewarded with a
thrashing—or rather, when such conduct was unheard of, for the negroes generally had good manners till the Yankees corrupted them.” Although southern whites had frequently blamed “outside influences” for their troubles, the evidence now seemed more compelling than ever before, particularly with all the wild talk about granting privileges and rights to the newly freed slaves. As a New Orleans newspaper quickly noted, only “wicked demagogues” could induce otherwise innocent and well-behaved blacks to entertain ideas about “rights.”

With some justification, white Southerners accused the North of hypocrisy in seeking to impose upon them a racial equality which most Northerners would have abhorred. Everyone knew, a South Carolina magistrate averred, that in northern schools, street railways, steamers, and hotels, racial distinctions were maintained “which we have been accustomed to observe at the South.… This is all we ask—no more, no less, than our northern brethren claim for themselves.” Whatever use whites made of this charge, some came to question its veracity, particularly after watching certain Yankee officers, missionaries, and teachers overindulge the freedmen, mix with them socially, and encourage their “impudence.” The Reverend Samuel A. Agnew of Mississippi found incredible the reports that Federal authorities had fined a “gentleman” for merely “slapping a negroe off the pavement” and that Yankees had “cruelly beaten” a white clergyman “because his wife whipped a little negroe.” Apparently, Agnew concluded, “the negroe is a sacred animal. The Yankees are about negroes like the Egyptians were about cats. Negrophilism is the passion with them. When they come to their senses they will find that the negroe must be governed in the same way.” But the chances of Yankees coming to their senses seemed rather dim to Ethelred Philips, the Florida farmer and physician, after observing in his wife’s “Lady’s book” that “the most fashionable head dress” in the North had become “the
African,”
because the “very
short curls”
were meant to imitate the “beauty of the negro’s kinks of wool!” The next “rage,” he assumed, would be “to marry no other color.”
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If the North seriously intended to recast the South in its own image, that could conjure up all kinds of “mongrel” images in the minds of whites already made uneasy by the actions of the freedmen. Even as some southern newspapers and orators chided the North for oppressing its own blacks, white visitors to that region wrote home alarming reports of the veritable Negro haven they had uncovered in Yankeedom.

With nearly 4,000,000 newly freed blacks in the South, as contrasted with less than 400,000 blacks in the North, this surely was for southern whites a most frightening vision of the future.

T
HE SPECTER
of Africanization lurked behind every assertive move made by blacks in the aftermath of emancipation. When they chose to test their freedom by entering public places from which they had previously been barred or by sitting indiscriminately in public conveyances where their presence had previously been restricted, the worst fears of the white South were realized and the utmost vigilance demanded. Under slavery, the body servants or maids who accompanied their masters or mistresses into these places or conveyances had seldom aroused any comment or controversy. But once blacks ceased to be slaves, traveling in the company of their owners, their presence suddenly became an intrusion and a source of contamination, symbolizing an equality most whites found threatening. With emancipation, then, exclusion and segregation became even more firmly embedded in the lives of black people, barring some of them from privileges they might have exercised as slaves. That is, the context in which blacks traveled and used public facilities became all-important, with the intermixing of races permitted only in those situations where the superiority of whites was clearly understood. The Mississippi law of 1865 that barred blacks from railroad cars “set apart, or used by, and for white persons” thus exempted “Negroes or mulattoes, travelling with their mistresses, in the capacity of nurses,” and a Savannah ordinance prohibiting blacks from entering the public park exempted those who accompanied a white child.
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With large numbers of freedmen on the move after emancipation, the controversy over their use of public conveyances and their behavior on the principal urban promenades came almost immediately to a head.

The indignity of it all was more than most whites could bear and they quickly moved to lay down a color line that would maintain the old racial distinctions and impress upon the newly freed slaves their place as a separate and inferior people. In most instances, the “color line” simply perpetuated distinctions that had been made during slavery. On the city streetcars, blacks were forced to ride on the open platforms or in separate and specially marked cars. (In New Orleans, for example, blacks rode only on cars marked with a black star.) On the railroads, blacks were excluded from first-class accommodations (the “ladies’ car”) and relegated to the smoking compartments or to freight boxcars in which seats or benches had been placed. On the steamboats plying the waterways and coasts, blacks were expected to sleep on the open deck and to eat with the servants, although they paid the same fares as white passengers.
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Seldom written into law (only Florida, Mississippi, and Texas thought it necessary to enact “Jim Crow” laws in 1865 and 1866), the practices and customs governing racial contact in public places and accommodations acquired the force of statutes, backed as they were by a nearly unanimous white public opinion and local police power. If any black passengers protested these inferior accommodations, they faced the likelihood of expulsion, violence, or verbal harassment. “You’re free, aint you?” a railroad conductor mocked one such passenger. “Good as white folks, aint ye! Then pay the same fare, and keep your mouth shut.” With equal clarity, a Richmond newspaper advised black passengers not to trouble themselves “about first class seats until they are fully recognized as a first class people.”
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The restrictions imposed on the freedmen never approximated the thoroughness with which southern legislatures and communities segregated the races in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The racial distinctions that characterized the immediate post-emancipation years were almost always understood rather than stated. But to the blacks themselves, the differences might have seemed minimal and the risks incurred in flaunting deeply rooted social customs were no less pronounced than those which would later inhibit a successful challenge to Jim Crow laws. What whites aspired to in both instances was a separation of the races, and the post-emancipation restrictions were by no means limited to public transportation. If admitted at all to public places, such as theaters and churches, blacks sat in separate and inferior sections, usually the rear
seats or the balcony. Few if any public inns or restaurants accommodated them, except for those which catered exclusively to blacks. (The Union Hotel in Augusta, Georgia, for example, advertised itself as a first-class hotel “for the special accommodation of the Citizen and Travelling Public of Color.”)
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Not knowing what to expect, some hotels and public inns had considered reclassifying themselves as private houses in order to exclude black patrons. Knowing what to expect, most blacks avoided such places rather than be insulted and ejected. The ludicrous extent to which legislatures segregated the races later in the century was clearly anticipated in the instructions given black people in Natchez in 1866 that henceforth the promenades along the river and the bluff to the right of Main Street would be reserved “for the use of the whites, for ladies and children and nurses—the central Bluff between Main Street and State for bachelors and the colored population, and the lower promenade for the whites.” Not far behind, Georgia decreed that black and white patients in the “Lunatic Asylum” be kept separate—a decision justified as “in the wisest sanitary policy”—and in Richmond, Virginia, blacks and whites applied for “destitute rations” at separate places.
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The determination of whites to maintain a color line in public places and conveyances conflicted with the desire of many ex-slaves to utilize facilities from which they had been barred and to achieve a public equality that seemed justified by their new status. To press their demands for equal access, blacks questioned the logic that underlay segregationist and exclusionist practices. Why, for example, did black men and women traveling by themselves in public conveyances pose a danger, whereas black maids, nurses, and servants accompanying a white mistress or white children did not? “If the idea is so dreadful,” a black newspaper in Georgia asked, “why should poor little children be forced to draw sustenance from black breasts, be kissed by black lips, and hugged by black arms?” Apparently, another black editor suggested, colored people in the act of nursing white children were noncontagious. Some decades would elapse before the wet nurse herself became suspect. “We gave our infants to the black wenches to suckle,” an elderly South Carolinian reflected in 1885, “and thus poisoned the blood of our children, and made them
cowards
 … it will take 500 years, if not longer, by the infusion of new blood to eradicate the hereditary vices imbibed with the blood (milk is blood) of black wet nurses.”
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