Been in the Storm So Long (71 page)

He returned to the plantation, empty-handed, thinking himself “a fool” for ever having left. “I ax where that nigger what ’ticed me off to the north and they all ’low that he done took the consumption and died soon after I done gone from home. I never had no consumption, but it took me long time to git over the grippe. I goes to old Marse and hires myself out and I never left him no more till the Lawd took him away.”
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Like John Petty, many of the migrants drifted back to the old places, their dreams and expectations of a different way of life having yielded them only frustration and a sense of betrayal. To return to the familiar surroundings often became a matter of survival rather than homesickness or attachment to “old Marse.” “The Freedmen’s Bureau helped us some,” Squire Dowd recalled, “but we finally had to go back to the plantation in order to live.” Along the wharves in Charleston, a northern visitor encountered some 1,500 freedmen waiting for transportation back to their old homes, some of them also resigned to resuming the old way of life, others hopeful they might attain something better. “We wants to git away to work on our own hook,” one of them explained. “It’s not a good time at all here. We does nothing but suffer from smoke and ketch cold. We wants to begin de planting business.” An elderly black woman, who had been waiting here for more than two weeks, poured out her feelings of frustration and concluded with a dim view of her future prospects. “De jew and de air hackles we more ’n anyting. De rain beats on we, and de sun shines we out. My chil’n so hungry dey can’t hole up. De Gov’ment, he han’t gib we nottin’.… Some libs and some dies. If dey libs dey libs, and if dey dies dey dies.”
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The sight of former slaves returning, many of them thoroughly disillusioned with “freedom” and Yankee promises, no doubt pleased and reassured planter families. That some of their former slaves should have
traveled a great distance to be back on the old place impressed the daughter of a Georgia planter as “a fact that speaks louder than words as to their feeling for their old master and former treatment.” The talk in the Chesnut family was of the plight of “poor Old Myrtilia,” who had left with the Yankees and now wrote “the most pathetic letters” asking to be returned. When no one in the Chesnut family offered to help her, she managed to get back on her own. That impressed Mary Chesnut, who concluded that Myrtilia, like so many ex-slaves after the “first natural frenzy of freedom,” had simply discovered “on which side her bread was buttered” and “where her real friends were.” With similar confidence, former slaveholders looked upon the return of blacks as a step closer to a resumption of the old relationships that had characterized bondage. “My own negro boy, whom I have owned since infancy,” a Virginia physician testified, “has returned to me.… He has returned to his old status. The feeling between the negroes and their former masters seems to be perfectly kind; I see the negroes working as usual.”
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That confidence rested in some instances on the satisfaction evinced by their former slaves in returning to the old places and positions. If some still harbored feelings of bitterness and disappointment over their fate, they seemed to appreciate the greater measure of security they now enjoyed and the chance to renew old friendships among those with whom they had shared bondage. Not long after the war, Mary Anderson recalled, her former master and mistress went out in a carriage to relocate their former slaves. With apparent ease, they persuaded many of them to return, and it seemed as if little had changed, with the blacks still addressing the whites as “master” and “missus” and resuming their usual tasks and demeanor. “My father and mother, two uncles and their families moved back,” Mary Anderson remembered. “Also Lorenza Brodie, and John Brodie and their families moved back. Several of the young men and women who once belonged to him came back. Some were so glad to get back they cried, ’cause fare had been mighty bad part of the time they were rambling around and they were hungry.”
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Not every planter welcomed back the freedmen who had left him. If their departure had been interpreted as betrayal or ingratitude, the former owners might not wish to see them again; some eagerly anticipated their ex-slaves begging to return and prepared to turn them off, while still others expressed a willingness to hire them but would not entrust them with positions of responsibility. “They’ll all be idle before winter,” predicted a South Carolina “gentleman,” who had apparently lost the bulk of his slave force. “I don’t look for nothing else when cold weather comes but to have them all asking me to take them back; but I sha’n’t do it. I wouldn’t give ten cents apiece for them.” Even if dispossessed planters shared similar feelings about hiring back their former slaves, most of them could ill afford such thoughts in regions where labor was scarce. Not only did planters seek out the blacks who had left them after emancipation but a few went so far as to try to lure back some able slave who had fled before or during the war.
If former slaveholders found this a disagreeable and even demeaning task, many of the freedmen they sought were no less chagrined by the thought of working on the old places again. No matter how enticing the offer or how desperate their own situation had become, they might choose to cling stubbornly to whatever degree of separation from the old way of life they had managed to attain. With emancipation, Archie Millner’s father, who had been a slave in Virginia, took his family, crossed the county line, and fixed up a shanty for them on the edge of the woods. His former master, who became “hard fixed fo’ someone to work fo’ him,” located the Millner family and pleaded with them to return to the plantation, even offering them the overseer’s house. “Pa listened to him through but shook his head. ‘Reckon I better stay here,’ said pa. Ole man Brown say, ‘All right, John, I see how you feel ’bout it. But it’s all right; I kin make out somehow, an’ if you ever need anything come on over to de place an’ git it.’ But pa never would go back.”
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Where the ties between the “white folks” and the slaves had been fairly close, some of the freedmen returned to the old places but with no intention of staying. That is, they might choose to pay a social visit, perhaps to let their former master and mistress know how they were faring in freedom or to see their old friends who had remained after emancipation. Several years after leaving her mistress, Mandy Hadnot, a former Texas slave, still thought of her often “all ’lone in de big house” and finally resolved to see her again. “I go to see her and took a peach pie, ’cause I lub her and I know dat’s what she like better’n anything.” The two women said the Lord’s Prayer together, as they had often done before, and parted knowing they would never see each other again. At times, the situation would be reversed, with former masters and mistresses calling on their former slaves. Many years after emancipation, Jim Leathers, a North Carolina planter, decided to visit his old hands, most of whom were concentrated in Dix Hill, near Raleigh. “We had a big supper in his honor,” John Coggin recalled. Few of them could have imagined how this memorable reunion would end. “Dat night he died, an’ ’fore he died his min’ sorta wanders an’ he thinks dat hit am back in de slave days an’ dat atter a long journey he am comin’ back home. Hit shore wuz pitiful an’ we shore did hate it.”
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If the return of former slaves, whether to stay or to pay a friendly visit, suggested the durability of the “old ties,” planter families found even more compelling evidence in the number of blacks who had not moved at all but continued with their usual tasks in the usual way, seemingly oblivious to their freedom and the world outside the plantation. Not all the freed slaves who chose to remain, however, would have shared that view of their decision. Whatever the degree of their commitment to the old ties, many of them perceived all too accurately what lay beyond the boundaries of the plantation and opted for the relative security of the old place, at least until they ascertained how compatible this might be with the exercise of their newly won freedom.

A
FTER THE SHOUTING
and singing had ended, a former Mississippi field hand recalled of emancipation, “we got to wonderin’ ’bout what good it did us. It didn’ feel no diffrunt; we all loved our marster an’ missus an’ stayed on wid ’em jes’ lak nothin’ had happened.” The same story was related on numerous farms and plantations in the post-emancipation South. Not only did many freed slaves remain on the same place but they said “marse” and “missus” to the same white folks, worked under the same overseer and driver, lived in the same quarters, performed the same tasks, and suffered the same punishments for the same offenses. After agreeing to remain with his former master for forty cents a day, James Green, a twenty-five-year-old Texas field hand who had been sold from his Virginia home some thirteen years before, perceived “no big change” on the plantation. “De same houses and some got whipped but nobody got nailed to a tree by de ears, like dey used to.” But to Levi Pollard, a former Virginia slave, who also remained on the same place, the few changes he did discern made a significant difference. “Us live in de same fine house en do the same kinda work, but us git real money fer hit, a hundred dollars a year. Den, us wuz us own boss, en could [come] en go like us any white, jus’ so’s us put in time dat us wuz paid fa. En on top er dat, us could have crops, en a garden ’round de house.”
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Whether to justify the confidence placed in them or from considerations of age, infirmity, or self-interest, some freedmen never seem to have entertained the thought of leaving the farms and plantations on which they had labored as slaves. In their minds, as in their day-to-day lives, the terms “our white folks” and “our home” had become synonymous, and they saw no reason to alter a relationship and situation they deemed favorable to their own best interests. “We was just one fam’ly an’ had all we needed,” explained John Evans, a former North Carolina slave. “We never paid no ’tention to freedom or not freedom.” The recollections of former slaves who remained on the same places after emancipation repeated the same themes. This was their home, “these were our folks,” this was the only kind of life they had known, their relatives and friends were here, and to abandon the known and the familiar for uncertainty and danger seemed both foolish and irresponsible. The day of emancipation, Ed McCree remembered, was “a happy day” on the plantation, but he remained there with his parents for more than a year and thought he understood the reason. “If us had left, it would have been jus’ lak swappin’ places from de fryin’ pan to de fire, ’cause Niggers didn’t have no money to buy no land wid for a long time atter de war.”
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For some freed slaves, however, to remain on the same plantations was neither an easy nor a popular decision. Not only might they find themselves isolated from their fellow blacks who had left but they could be
subjected to criticism and harassment if the departure of the others had been designed to protest the cruelty of the master or to press him into more favorable contractual terms. Her decision to remain with the same master, Adeline Blakely recalled, placed her in “a wrong attitude” with local blacks, most of whom had not shared her “happy” days in the Big House. “I was pointed out as different. Sometimes I was threatened for not leaving.” But she endured the name-calling and harassment to stay with the white folks she thought of as “my people.” If remaining with a former owner subjected some ex-slaves to the hostility of their fellow blacks, the decision to leave, as many freedmen discovered, exposed them to the violence of hostile whites. In choosing to stay on the same place, black families expected from their former master the same protection from gangs of roving whites that he had provided them from the patrollers. Her old master had little money after emancipation, Virginia Bell recalled, and “things was mighty hard for a while,” but those who stayed with him “wasn’ as bad off as some, ’cause white folks knew we was Massa Lewis’ folks and didn’ bother us none.”
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Not all the freedmen who remained with their previous owners felt the same degree of attachment or sense of obligation. But no matter how they viewed the old ties, they were all likely to agree on the absence of realistic alternatives. After assessing their chances elsewhere, even some of the more independent-minded freed slaves might opt for certainties and survival. To dwell too long on other possibilities seemed like an exercise in futility. “Us had no education, no land, no mule, no cow, not a pig, nor a chicken, to set up house keeping,” Violet Guntharpe recalled. “De birds had nests in de air, de foxes had holes in de ground, and de fishes had beds under de great falls, but us colored folks was left widout any place to lay our heads.”
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The decision to stay on the same plantation was never an accurate measure of fidelity nor did it necessarily stem from ignorance or an innate docility. But it could serve as a reliable measurement of disillusionment with “freedom.”